Juan José García Ripoll finished his PhD in Optics at Univ. Complutense deMadrid, while working at Univ. Castilla La Mancha on Bose-Einstein condensates and nonlinear Optics. He then moved to Munich with Ignacio Cirac, where he developed some key contributions in the fields of trapped ion quantum computing and help start the field of quantum simulation with ultracold atoms. Juanjo García Ripoll presently leads the Quantum Information and Foundations Group at the Institute of Fundamental Physics, in the Spanish Research Council. He is also the coordinator of the CSIC Platform on Quantum Technologies and of the Spanish Network of Quantum Information and Quantum Technologies.