José W. F. Valle (1953) started his studies on Physics at the University of Brasília, in his native Brasil.  His beginnings in high energy physics research date back to his doctorate at Syracuse University (New York, USA) in 1982, from where he moved to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK as a postdoctoral researcher. After a stay at the Universitat Autònoma of Barcelona he arrived at the Institute of Corpuscular Physics of València in 1987, where he has been responsible for the unit of Theoretical Physics and leads the research group in Physics of Astroparticles and High Energies (Astroparticles).

He is author of more than 300 scientific articles that accumulate nearly 30,000 citations, making him one of the most cited high energy theoretical physicists in Spain. He has made significant contributions to the study of neutrinos, an elementary particle that barely interacts with ordinary matter and is believed to hold valuable information about the early Universe. It is known as the 'ghost particle' because of its difficulty in being detected.

José Valle contributed to the development of models to explain how neutrinos acquire mass.  That neutrinos have mass was demonstrated at the beginning of the 21st century with the discovery of the phenomenon known as 'neutrino oscillations', which the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2015 brought to its discoverers and which the Spanish-Brazilian researcher helped to interpret. In addition, along with Joseph Schechter he proposed a way to check if the neutrino is its own antiparticle, a question that remains unresolved and whose confirmation would clarify one of the great questions of the origin of the Universe: why are we made of matter?

From his work at the Institute of Corpuscular Physics, the CSIC Centre of Excellence Severo Ochoa and the Universitat de València, in the Science Park, José W. F. Valle has contributed to the training of more than fifty young researchers over the last 25 years, many of them from Latin American countries, especially Mexico. For this reason, the Particles and Fields Division of the Mexican Physical Society awarded him its Medal in 2014 in recognition of his work in promoting science on both sides of the Atlantic. He has also received the Humboldt Foundation Prize for Research in Particle Physics (2002) and the Iberdrola Prize for Science and Technology in Theoretical Physics (1999). In addition, the researcher is working hard to strengthen cooperation between scientists in Latin America and Europe.