Luis Viña, born 1957, is the head of Department of Physics of Materials at the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain) and Professor of Condensed Matter Physics. He made his thesis work under the supervision of Prof. Manuel Cardona at the Max-Planck Institut für Festkörperforschung in Stuttgart (Germany) working on optical properties of semiconductors. He spent two years at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights (NY, USA) in the group of Leo Esaki, studying electric field effects on the light emission of quantum wells. He joined afterwards the Spanish Research Council (CSC) where he investigated the magnetooptical properties of low-dimensional semiconductor structures. In 1995 he became professor at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid where he built up a new time-resolved spectroscopy lab to study the dynamics of different excitations in bulk semiconductors and semiconductor heterostructures. Since the early years of this century, he has been interested in the dynamics of polariton condensates in semiconductor microcavities. He has worked as invited researcher in several institutions including AT&T Bell Laboratories at Holmdel (NJ, USA), the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris, France), the Université Joseph Fourier and High Magnetic Field Laboratories of the CNRS (Grenoble, France) and the Ecole Polytechnique Federale (Lausanne, Switzerland). He is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and of the Institute of Physics (UK) and elected member of the Academia Europaea. He is an outstanding referee of the APS, has been bestowed with the “Otto Hahn Medal and Fellowship” of the German Max-Planck Society and the “Henri Abraham Award for distinguished long service to IUPAP”.