Xavier Ariza was born in Barcelona (1966). He studied Chemistry (1989) at the University of Barcelona (UB) and obtained his PhD degree (1995) for studies on nucleoside chemistry at the same university. He also worked at ETH-Zürich (1993) and at Stanford University (1996-1997), in the area of asymmetric synthesis and organometallic chemistry. Since 2001 he has been Associate Professor at the Organic Chemistry Section in the Chemistry School at the University of Barcelona, located at the Barcelona Knowledge Campus (BKC). Recently, he became member of the Institute of Biomedicine of the University of Barcelona (IBUB) in the group "Synthetic Methodology Applied to Bioactive Compounds" (SMBioCom).

Throughout his career he has been interested in organic and organometallic chemistry and lately, he has been focusing on the research in these areas for the solution of biomedical problems. Currently, he works on projects that develop methodologies for the synthesis of new drugs against obesity and cancer, in collaboration with the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department at the Faculty of Pharmacy at the UB. He is also associated with the pharmaceutical industry (Esteve Química, SA) for the production of commercially available drugs.