Luis Menéndez-Arias is a Research Professor of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spanish National Research Council) and Group Leader at the Centro de Biología Molecular Severo Ochoa in Madrid, where he has been working since 1994. He was born in 1961, Oviedo, Spain. He studied biology at the Complutense University of Madrid, where he received his Ph.D. in 1989. He was trained as a postdoctoral fellow in the Frederick Cancer Research and Development Center (Frederick, Maryland, USA), where he conducted studies on the biochemical properties of retroviral proteases and their implications in virus maturation and antiviral therapy. His research has been mainly devoted to understanding structure-activity relationships in human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) reverse transcriptase (RT), elucidating mechanisms of HIV resistance to antiretroviral drugs, and understanding HIV replication fitness. Part of this work involved the development of engineered RTs with increased fidelity and/or thermal stability. Selected enzymes are being commercialized for biotechnological applications. More recently, his group has been involved in the discovery of ribonuclease H inhibitors that could be turned into drug candidates against HIV infection and other viral diseases. Luis Menéndez-Arias is author or co-author of more than 150 peer-reviewed research papers, and is member of the Editorial Boards of Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, Antiviral Research, Antiviral Therapy, Frontiers in Virology, Journal of Biological Chemistry, Pharmaceutical Fronts, Virus Research and Viruses. He has been an invited fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (2013) and the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences (Shandong University, Jinan, China) (2019).