Santiago Garcia Granda (born 1955 in Verdicio, Asturias), studied chemistry and graduated in 1980, and earned his PhD in 1984 at the University of Oviedo. He completed his academic training as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Nijmegen, Holland with Professor Paul T. Beurskens. He specialised in structural determination, crystallography, diffraction and methods of calculations. He is ex-president of the European Crystallographic Association (ECA) where he has served since August 2006 and has just been elected ordinary member of the executive committee of the International Union of Crystallography.