Dr. Rafael Álvarez studied an engineering Bachelors+Masters degree in Computer Science (2001) and obtained a PhD in Computer Science (2005), both from the University of Alicante.

Recipient of the extraordinary doctorate award in 2009, a predoctoral collaboration grant from the Ministry of Education for a research project in the final year of the degree, as well as a postdoctoral grant under the José Castillejo program for a research visit at the Claude Shannon Institute (Dublin) hosted by Gary McGuire in 2008. Fluent in English, he has obtained a C2 certificate in English (Cambridge Proficiency).

He was Assistant at the Complutense University of Madrid and later held several positions at the University of Alicante, being a tenured Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence of the University of Alicante since 2017. In this department he has held several management positions as well, being Secretary (2008 to 2012), Deputy Director (2012, 2013 and 2016) and Director (2016 to 2021).

His main areas of interest are essentially cryptography, cybersecurity or information security and their applications to computing.