Santi Nonell is a ICREA Professor of Physical Chemistry at the Institut Químic de Sarrià (IQS), University Ramon Llull, Barcelona, Spain, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. He earned his Ph.D. for work carried out at the Max-Planck-Institut für Strahlenchemie (1985-1988) and conducted postdoctoral research at the Arizona State University and the University of California Los Angeles (1991-1992).

He served as President of the European Society of Photobiology, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Photochemical & Photobiological Sciences, and Chair of the Spanish Network of Biological Photochemistry. He is currently the Director of the Photobiology School of the European Society for Photobiology.

His core research interests lie in the area of biological photochemistry, with a focus on singlet oxygen and the photochemical aspects of photodynamic therapy, a field to which he has contributed more than 200 papers