Joan Llopis Marí was born on 24th December 1918 in Cullera. He began his primary education in parochial schools and, subsequently, he studied upper secondary education in a boarding school in Teruel. He pursued a degree in Chemistry with honours at the University of Valencia in 1940. Later, he moved to Oviedo for a month in order to take a course that allowed him to become a chemical engineer. At the beginning of 1944, he was in Madrid to pursue his doctorate thesis “On the anodic oxidation of hypochlorites”, supervised by Antonio Ríes.
In 1946, he married Carmen Carles, a graduate in Philosophy and Humanities, and they moved to London where Joan Llopis Marí had obtained a scholarship from the University of Cambridge.
Back to Spain, he worked at the Rocasolano Institute and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) as well as at the Complutense University of Madrid. He was honoured by several organisations and foundations. The Spanish Royal Society of Physics and Chemistry awarded him in 1959. Afterwards, he received the award and scholarship from the Juan March foundation in 1963 and the award Francisco Franco in 1967.
A persistent researcher and scientist, he wrote more than a hundred articles in specialised Spanish journals and around fifty papers in foreign journals. He gave lectures around the world and supervised doctoral thesis. He lived most of his life in Madrid but he never forgot his roots as he returned to Cullera from time to time.
A scientist and a multilingual person - he mastered his mother tongue, Spanish, French, English and Russian - and a great humanist: his library included all kinds of classic universal literature books. He died in Cullera at the age of 54 on 16th June 1972 with many pending projects.