Ricardo Santamaría Ramírez graduated from University of Alicante, Spain, where received his MSc in Chemistry and PhD in Chemistry in 1986 and 1993 respectively. After a 3-years post-doc in the Research Centre of Repsol (Cartagena) he joined INCAR-CSIC in 1995 where he is been working since then. During his research career he has done different stays such as in Newcastle University (UK) in 1986 or University Federal of Minas Gerais (UFMG, Brazil) between 2015-2017.

An important part of his research has been focused on the transformation of different industrial by-products as precursors of carbonaceous materials, both from petroleum and coal derivatives, developing different kind of materials such as high density graphites, general purpose carbon fibers, high moduli carbon fibers, carbon/carbon composites, graphenes, activated carbons etc. Since 2000, his research focused on the development of energy storage systems, including Li-ion batteries, supercapacitors, hybrid supercapacitors and vanadium redox flow batteries. And more recently he is been involved in new fields of research such as all-iron redox flow batteries or the development of suitable catalyst for hydrogen production by electrolysis.