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. Verde has received the 2012 Gruber prize in Cosmology, the Narcis Monturiol medal 2017, the 2018 Breakthrough prize in fundamental physics, the  premi Nacional de Recerca 2018, the European Astroniomical Society Lodewijk Woltjier Lecture 2019,  the Premi Rei Jaume I for fundamental science in 2021, and 2024 Physics Medal, Real Sociedad Espan ̃ola de F ́ısica RSEF/BBVA.

I am interested in Cosmology, which is the study of the origin, evolution and composition of the universe. Cosmology has a standard model which is extremely successful but leaves several open questions such as what is dark matter, what is dark energy which may indicate the need for new physics. I study the "large-scale structure of the Universe", the statistical properties of cosmic structure (including the galaxy distribution) and how they emerge and evolve from the Universe's initial conditions, which can be gleaned from  the statistical properties of the heat left over from the big bang. These observations are used to shed light on the Universe composition, including the dark energy component, the Universe's  history and evolution and ultimately the physics governing it.