Álvaro de Rújula graduated and obtained his PHD in Physics in Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He has worked in Italy (ICTP, Trieste), France (IHES and Saclay, close to Paris), in the USA (Harvard and Boston Universities), at CERN (in diverse roles, from Summer Student to leader of the Theory Division) and in Madrid (Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Autónoma University).

In the 1970's he contributed to the consolidation of the Standard Model of particle physics, in particular to the study of QCD, charmed particles and their predicted masses. He has worked in many other fields, such as "X-raying" the Earth with neutrinos, measuring their masses in the lab, searching for antimatter in the Universe, understanding cosmic rays and gamma-ray bursts, and the development of the sophisticated methods that contributed to the discovery of the Higgs boson.