Ranulfo Romo was born on August 28, 1954 in Ures, Sonora, Mexico. He received his M.D. from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1978 and his Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Paris in 1985. He carried out posdoctoral work with Jacques Glowinski at the College de France in Paris, Wolfram Schultz at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, and with Vernon Mountcastle at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. In 1989, Romo returned to Mexico at the Institute of Cell Physiology of UNAM, where he has been working ever since as a Full Professor. His research aims to understand how the brain represents sensory information, and which attributes of the neural representations are meaningful for conscious perception, memory and decision-making. His laboratory discovered a family of neural codes associated with perception, working-memory and decision-making during perceptual decisions.

Romo was Editor in Chief of Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, Associate Editor of the Journal of Neuroscience and eLife. Presently, he is Section Editor of Neuroscience and serves as member of the editorial boards of Neuron, Progress in Neurobiology, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, among others. He is member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences, the World Academy of Sciences (TWAS), Foreign Associate of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National College of Mexico, and foreign member of the Royal Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences of Spain. He received the 1990 Demuth Prize from the Swiss Medical Research Foundation, the 1994 American States Organization Prize for Biology. He also received from 1991 to 2012 the International Research Scholars Award from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the 2000 National Prize on Sciences and Arts from the Mexican Government and the 2003 Basic Medical Science Prize from TWAS, among other awards. In 2017 was named Doctor Honoris Causa by UNAM and in 2019 by the University of Sonora, Mexico. Romo delivered the 2001 Open Lecture at the Spanish Society for Neuroscience Congress, the 2005 Brooks Lecture at Harvard Medical School, the 2005 Presidential Lecture at the Society for Neuroscience Meeting, the 2006 Servier Lecture at the University of Montreal, the 2006 Teuber Lecture at MIT, the Pinckney J. Hartman Lecture at the Cajal Club, the 2009 Ragnar Granit Lecture at the Nobel Institution and Karolinska Institute, the 2013 Closing Lecture at the Spanish Society for Neuroscience, and the 2015 Brenda Milner Lecture at McGill University, among many other plenary lectures.