Renan Augusto Lisboa Almeida is a Brazilian physicist born in Barbacena, Minas Gerais, on March 29, 1990. He completed his BSc (2013) and MSc (2015) in Physics at the Universidade Federal de Viçosa under the supervision of Prof. Sukarno Ferreira. He was the lead author of the first experimental report confirming universal distributions in the two-dimensional Kardar–Parisi–Zhang (KPZ) universality class.

In 2016, he became a DC1 fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and joined the PhD program at the Tokyo Institute of Technology under the supervision of Prof. Kazumasa A. Takeuchi. He obtained his PhD in 2019 with a thesis on experimental studies of phase-ordering kinetics in liquid crystals and interface growth using his thin-film setup. (In 2017, he returned briefly to Brazil to marry Míriam Almeida, a Brazilian journalist and entrepreneur, with whom he had been in a relationship since 2008.)

After a break, he returned to academia as a postdoctoral researcher in the group of Prof. Jeferson J. Arenzon at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. During this period, he revisited his liquid-crystal dataset and published two papers in Physical Review Letters. He showed that, during the ordering kinetics of twisted nematic liquid crystals, the system forms critical clusters whose statistical properties obey exact results from percolation theory, including Cardy’s formula, conformal invariance properties consistent with Schramm–Loewner evolution (SLE), and a generalization of the Lawler–Schramm–Werner theorem.

He later joined the group of Prof. Leticia Cugliandolo at the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Hautes Énergies (LPTHE) at Sorbonne Université in Paris, where he carried out his theoretical idea of extending studies on coarsening dynamics by Arenzon, Cugliandolo, and Almeida to the subject of growing interfaces.