Juan Ignacio Cirac has a degree in theoretical physics and a doctorate (1991) from the Complutense University of Madrid (1888). He worked as a post-doctoral researcher with Peter Zoller, at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics of the University of Colorado (United States). Between 1991 and 1996, he was professor of physics at the University of Castilla-La Mancha, in Ciudad Real, from which he was later awarded an honorary doctorate. Since 2001, he has been director of the Theoretical Division of the Max Plank Institute in Garching, Germany, and since its foundation in 2002, he has been a visiting professor and scientific research advisor at the Institute of Photonic Sciences of Barcelona (ICFO), where he collaborates with the Quantum Information Theory group. Cirac has been working doing research at the universities of Colorado, Innsbruck, Harvard, Hamburg, California, Oxford, Hanover, Bristol, Paris, the Center for Nuclear Studies of Saclay, the École Normale Superieur de Paris and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.