Alírio Rodrigues graduated in Chemical Engineering at the Faculty of Engineering of the U. Porto (FEUP) in 1968. After a training period in Angola at the brewery company CUCA and oil refinery FINA he joined the Department of Chemical Engineering of U. of Luanda as Teaching Assistant. In 1970 he started post-graduate studies at the Centre de Cinétique Physique et Chimique (CNRS) and ENSIC; in 1973 he obtained his Dr-Ing. degree at the U. de Nancy I, France in the area of Ion Exchange. He went back to the U. Luanda end of 1973 and return to Portugal end of 1975 joining for a short period the U. of Évora and later in 1976 the Department of Chemical Engineering of FEUP. He created a research group which became the Laboratory of Separation and Reaction Engineering (LSRE). He was Director of LSRE until 2012. Under his leadership LSRE created the pole at IPB and obtained the status of Associate Laboratory in partnership with LCM. He was visiting professor at UTC, France, U. Virginia, USA, U. Oviedo, Spain and UFC, Brazil. Since 2013 he is Emeritus Professor of U. Porto. He supervised more than 80 PhD students during his career and published more than 800 papers in peer-reviewed journals.