Luis Fernando Lara Ramos was born on March 20, 1943 in Mexico City. He has a degree in Spanish language and literature (1968) from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a doctorate in Hispanic linguistics and literature from the Colegio de México (1975). He completed specialized studies in general linguistics, semantics and Romance linguistics at the University of Kiel (summer 1969) and Heidelberg (winter 1969-1970) in the Federal Republic of Germany, in addition to studying computational linguistics and mathematics at the Scuola Stiva di Lingüística Matemática e Computazionale in Pisa, Italy (summers of 1974 and 1976), for which he had various scholarships granted by foreign institutions, such as the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (German Academic Exchange Service) of the Centro Nazionale Universitario di Calcolo Elettronico of Italy , on two occasions. In Germany, he was a Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation between 1983 and 1984, during which time he served as visiting researcher at the Romanisches Seminar at the University of Heidelberg, and at the Humboldt Universität Berlin in 2008.