Valerio Lucarini was born in Ancona (Italy) in 1976. He studied physics at Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa) and at the University of Pisa. He obtained in 2002 a MSc in Climate Physics and Chemistry at MIT and a PhD in Physics at the University of Eastern Finland. He has held academic positions at the University of Bologna, at the University of Hamburg, and at University of Reading, where he founded the Centre for the Mathematics of Planet Earth. Since 2024 he is Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Leicester, where he leads the Computational and Mathematical Modelling research group.
He has supervised over 15 PostDocs, 15 PhD students and over 20 MSc students. Some of them have received important accolades from the European Space Agency, European Geosciences Union, and American Geophysical Union and are scientific leaders in the broad area of nonlinear geophysics and climate dynamics.
Valerio is the recipient of the 2010 Arne Richter Award and of the 2020 L.F. Richardson Medal of the European Geosciences Union, of the 2018 Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society. He has delivered the 2021 Lorenz Lecture at the Annual Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, has received the 2022 SIAM Mathematics of Planet Earth award and the 2024 IUGG Keilis-Borok medal. He has held visiting positions in P.R. China, France, Germany, Hungary, and Russia. He is lead author for one of the chapters of the IPCC AR7 WG1 report.
After many years of participation to the editorial board of Nonlinear Processes of Geophysics and Earth System Dynamics, Valerio currently holds editorial roles for Physical Review E and Physical Review Letters. Between 2024 and 2025, Valerio has been the chair of the Topical Group on Physics of Climate of the American Physical Society.
He has organised many events for training and dissemination, including advanced schools in Les Houches (France) and at ICMS in Edinburgh (UK), and scientific programs at the I. Newton Institute in Cambridge (UK), and at the Institut Poincaré in Paris (France). Valerio has held an individual grant form the European Research Council and is currently involved in several UK-based and international projects delving into climatic tipping points, i.e. ClimTIP, Past2Future (Horizon Europe), PREDICT (ESA), AdvanTIP (ARIA). Valerio is author of over 160 publications in peer-reviewed journals and 2 books.