Licia Verde

Universitat de Barcelona

Experimental Sciences & Mathematics

Originally from Venice (Italy) Licia Verde studied physics as an undergraduate at the Università degli Studi di Padova. She obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh (UK) sponsored by a Marie Curie grant from the EU, and then moved to a research assistant position at Princeton University and at Rutgers University (USA). At Princeton she held a Chandra postdoctoral fellowship and a Spitzer postdoctoral fellowship and she entered the WMAP science team. She spent 4 years as faculty at the University of Pennsylvania (USA). In September 2007, she moved to Barcelona as an ICREA Research Professor.


Research interests

I am interested in Cosmology, which is the study of the origin, evolution and composition of the universe. One of the recent discoveries in cosmology is that more than 70% of what makes up the universe is not even matter, but something that suggests that some energy is associated with the nothingness of vacuum. This component has been dubbed “dark energy”. Dark energy may as well be one of the major problems in physics today and is motivating a host of future and planned experiments. I study the “large-scale distribution of galaxies” and the statistical properties of the heat left over from the big bang to shed light on the universe composition, including the dark energy component, and its history.

Selected publications

– Scelfo G, Bellomo N, Raccanelli A, Matarrese S & Verde L 2018, ‘GW x LSS: chasing the progenitors of merging binary black holes’, Journal Of Cosmology And Astroparticle Physics, 9, 039.

Jimenez R, Raccanelli A, Verde L & Matarrese S 2018, ‘Peering beyond the horizon with standard sirens and redshift drift’, Journal Of Cosmology And Astroparticle Physics, 4, 002.

– Tanabashi M, Hagiwara K, Hikasa K, Nakamura K, Sumino Y, Takahashi F, Tanaka J, Agashe K, Aielli G, Amsler C & 222 coauthors incl. Verde L 2018, ‘Review of Particle Physics‘, Physical Review D, Volume 98, Issue 3, id.030001

– Bellomo N, Bernal JL, Raccanelli A & Verde L 2018, ‘Primordial black holes as dark matter: converting constraints from monochromatic to extended mass distributions’, Journal Of Cosmology And Astroparticle Physics, 1, 004.


Selected research activities

– Chair of the  arXiv Science Advisory Board