Nicola Marzari has a Laurea degree in physics from the University of Trieste, and a PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge. He holds the chair of Theory and Simulation of Materials at EPFL, where he is the director of the National Center for Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials. He heads the Laboratory for Materials Simulations at the Paul Scherrer Institute, and has an Excellence Chair at the University of Bremen. Previous tenured appointments include the first Statutory Chair for Materials Modelling at the University of Oxford, and the Toyota Chair for Materials Processing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.