We are happy to welcome Professor Antonio M. Echavarren to the EuChemS community following his appointment as President of the Spanish Royal Society of Chemistry.

Antonio received his PhD at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid (UAM) in 1982. After a postdoctoral stay in Boston College and Colorado State University, he joined the Institute of Organic Chemistry of the CSIC in Madrid. In 1992, he returned to the UAM as a Professor and in 2004 moved to Tarragona as a Group Leader at the Institute of Chemical Research of Catalonia (ICIQ).

He has been Liebig Lecturer (2006), Abbot Lecturer (University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign, 2009), Schulich Visiting Professor (Technion, Haifa, 2011), Sir Robert Robinson Distinguished Lecturer (University of Liverpool, 2011), Novartis Lecturer in Organic Chemistry (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2015) and Kurt Alder Lecturer 2017 (University of Cologne).

In 2012, he was awarded the European Research Council Advanced Grant, and in 2014, he was the president of the 49th EUCHEM Conference on Stereochemistry (Bürgenstock conference). Prof. Echavarren is a member of the International Advisory Board of Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry, Chemical Society Reviews, Advisory Board of Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry, Chemical Society Reviews, Advanced Synthesis and Catalysis, and Organic Letters, member of the Editorial Board of Chemistry European Journal, and Associate Editor of Chemical Communications.

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. In 2004, he received the Janssen-Cylag Award in Organic Chemistry and the 2010 Gold Medal of the Royal Spanish Chemical Society, as well as an Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award from the ACS.