Licia Verde

Licia Verde was born in Venice, Italy where she grew up. She attended the Liceo classico Marco Polo before she started her undergraduate studies at the University of Padua. She moved to the University of Edinburgh in the fall of 1994, first as an Erasmus and later as a PhD student.

• 2000-2003. Research Associate, Dept. of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, USA
• 2003-2007. Faculty of Physics and Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania, USA
• 2007-2009. Visiting Senior Research Fellow. Dept. of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, USA
• 2007 – present. ICREA Professor of Cosmology, University of Barcelona, Spain
• 2012-2013. Scientific Associate, CERN, Switzerland
• 2013–2016. Professor II of Physics and Astronomy, University of Oslo, Norway
• 2015-2016. Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, USA
• 2019 - present. Chair of the science advisory board of the arXiv

• Performance prize from Aldo Gini Foundation (1995)[8]
• Chandra Fellowship (2002)[9]
• Niels Bohr Lecture (2004) “Cosmology from the Cosmic microwave background and galaxy surveys”, Niels Bohr Institute[10]
• NASA Group Achievement Award (2007) for the results of the WMAP mission[11]
• European Research Council (ERC) (2009) ERC starting award[12]
• Gruber Prize in Cosmology (2012)[13]
• Radcliffe Fellow (2015)[14]
• ISI highly cited researcher (2015)[15]
• European Research Council (2016) ERC Consolidator award[16]
• Narcis Monturiol medal (2018) Medalla Narcis Monturiol.[17]
• Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (2018) Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics as part of the WMAP team[18]
• National Research Award of Catalonia (2018) (Premi Nacional de Recerca)[19]
• European Astronomical SocietyLodewijk Woltjer Lecture (2019)[20]

Shortly after graduating from her PhD, Verde made her mark by analyzing a powerful but incredibly challenging statistical property of galaxy surveys related to higher-order correlations. She showed that galaxies of the Anglo Australian Two-degrees galaxy redshift survey (the largest three dimensional galaxy survey available then) trace the distribution of the elusive yet ubiquitous dark matter (which makes up about 90% of the mass of the universe). This result indicated that the galaxy distribution can be used to study the dark matter one [21].

After that she joined the science team of the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (later renamed Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy probe WMAP) a NASA space mission to map the full sky at radio waves with unprecedented clarity, frequency coverage, and resolution. Verde participated in analysis and interpretation of the Cosmic Microwave Background data from the WMAP satellite. This analysis was pivotal to establish what is today the standard model of cosmology. In this model, the Universe is composed by dark matter and dark energy and the standard matter as we know it makes up only about 5% of the universe. The galaxies and large scale structure we see today arose from tiny initial quantum fluctuations that got amplified by gravity over 13.7 billion years of evolution. This is the model that WMAP established [22].

After working on the WMAP mission Verde turned her attention to developing rigorous statistical tools to analyze surveys of the universe and thus connect theoretical models to the observations.

Thanks to two ERC grants: Cosmological Physics with future large-scale structure surveys (Phys.LSS)[12], and Beyond Precision Cosmology: dealing with Systematic Errors (BePreSyE)[16] she has established a vibrant and highly international research group in physical cosmology at the University of Barcelona. Her group is involved in the most ambitious cosmological experiments to date. Under her lead, the group has contributed to some of the most important results from the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations Survey part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: measurements of the expansion history of the universe and the formation of cosmological structures as well as constraint on cosmological parameters describing structure and detailed composition of the Cosmos. Her group is now involved with two forthcoming surveys: the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument survey and the Euclid mission. These surveys will provide detailed three dimensional maps of galaxies and large-scale cosmological structures covering unprecedented volume: the survey volume being a sizeable fraction of the entire observable Universe. If WMAP marked the inception of precision cosmology, the advent of such large surveys is propelling cosmology in the “big data” era.

The other recent direction of Verde's research is on the other elusive and dominant component of the universe: dark energy. Dark energy most visible effect is to make the relatively recent expansion of the universe accelerate rather than decelerates as one would expect. She has developed a model-independent and robust way to study the Universe's expansion history and infer from there the physical properties of dark energy, whatever that may be [23].

Verde has featured in a WGBH Forum Network documentary and has appeared in the film “Las leyes de la termodinámica” (the laws of thermodynamics) by Mateo Gil (Netflix and Sony pictures). She has been featured recently in the PBS show Closer to Truth.

• Timeline of women in science

• "Licia Verde Home page". icc.ub.edu.
• "Official CV" (PDF). icrea.cat. Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies.