Licia Verde
Basic Research 2021ICREA Professor. Institute of Cosmos Sciences. University of Barcelona
(Venice, aged 50). She holds a PhD in Astrophysics; she studied at the University of Padua, obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh and worked as a postdoctoral researcher at various universities in the USA.
She has been working in Barcelona since 2007 as an ICREA Professor. She received an ERC (European Research Council) Starting Grant (2009–2016) and an ERC Consolidator Grant (2017–2022). In her work, she is a pioneer in analytical techniques for extracting precise information about the physics governing the Universe. She has developed a robust, model-independent method for studying the expansion history of the Universe and, from this, inferring the physical properties of dark energy.
Among other awards, she has received the 2019 National Research Prize; the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics with the WMAP team in 2018; and the Narcis Monturiol Medal in 2017. In 2015, she was recognised by Thomson Reuters as the most cited researcher in her field.
She has been Scientific Director of JCAP since 2020; Editor of JCAP since 2017; Editor of *Physics of the Dark Universe* from 2013 to 2018; a member of the arXiv Science Advisory Board since 2016; and Chair since 2019.
Author of 192 peer-reviewed publications, 57,562 citations, h-index 74; last 5 years: 60 peer-reviewed publications, 5,089 citations, h-index 26 (Astrophysics Data System)
The jury for the Rei Jaume I Prize for Basic Research, meeting in Valencia, has decided to award the 2021 prize to Ms Licia Verde. Her research in theoretical astrophysics addresses complex issues such as the origin, composition, structure and evolution of the Universe.
