[1] He is the second son of António Seixas Louçã, a Portuguese Navy Officer, and his wife Noémia da Rocha Neves Anacleto, lawyer, granddaughter of António Neves Anacleto, from Silves, brother of Isabel Maria, António, João Carlos and Jorge Manuel, and cousin of Vítor Gaspar, former Minister of Finances at the right winged Pedro Passos Coelho's government.

He was arrested for a protest against the colonial war in 1972, before the fall of the dictatorship, which lasted in Portugal for about forty years and finished with the Carnation Revolution, (25 April 1974).

In 1999, after pursuing his academic career, he helped found the left-wing party Left Bloc (Portuguese: Bloco de Esquerda).

[citation needed] He is the author of several books and scientific articles on the history of economic thought, the dynamics of complex adaptive systems and the nature of long-term techno-economic change, including "Turbulence in Economics" (Elgar, 1997), "As Time Goes By" (with Christopher Freeman, Oxford University Press, 2011 and 2002, translated into Portuguese, Chinese), "The Years of High Econometrics" (Routledge, 2007) and a number of papers in scientific journals in economics, mathematical physics, history of economic ideas, mathematical modeling of financial markets, history of biology.

Francisco Louçã is one of the five personalities elected by the Assembly of the Republic to the Council of State on 18 December 2015, and he took office on 12 January 2016, serving until 2022.