Ángel del Campo y Cerdán
(Cuenca, 1881 – Madrid, 1944)

Ángel del Campo y Cerdán, a chemist, professor and academic, was a founding member of the Sociedad Española de Física y Química (1903). He obtained a grant from the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios to study in Paris in 1908, where he studied two subjects: spectrochemistry and George Urbain’s spectral analysis in the Laboratory of Mineral Chemistry, Faculty of Sciences at the Sorbonne; and food testing methods with Eugène Roux in the Central Research and Analysis Laboratory of the French Ministry of Agriculture. He published Estudio espectrográfico de las blendas. Investigación acerca de la blenda de Picos de Europa. Presencia del germanio en la misma, in collaboration with Urbain and Scal, in the Comptes rendus de l'Académie des Sciences, (1909).

Back in Spain, he set up a pioneer spectroscopy laboratory in the Laboratorio de Investigaciones Físicas (LIF) where scientific research "comparable and exportable to Europe” was conducted. In 1914, he published El espectro de bandas del silicio, a pioneer study on this field. In 1915, he became professor of Chemical Analysis, at the Faculty of Sciences in Madrid, and hired spectroscopist Miguel Catalán for the LIF.

In 1923, he took a new direction, focusing on his concern for the teaching of chemistry in Spain, its presence in international organizations and the institutionalization of different societies of chemistry. He joined the Academia de Ciencias in 1927, left the LIF and combined his teaching duties at the university with his work in the Instituto Técnico de Farmacología, where he focused on the chemical analysis of food and medicaments.

He spent the Civil War in Madrid, working with his disciples in the university and the Instituto de Farmacobiología. His main concerns were to obtain gasoline for airplanes, and a vaccine for pellagra.
After the war, he went through a purge process and was "rehabilitated without punishment."