Piero Madau is a Distinguished Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of California Santa Cruz. Born and educated in Italy, he graduated magna cum laude in Physics at the University of Florence, and received a PhD in Astrophysics at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste. He came to the United States in 1987 with a postdoctoral position at the California Institute of Technology, then moved to the Space Telescope Science Institute first as a Davis Fellow and then as a junior faculty. His interests in cosmology and galaxy formation brought him to the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge as a tenured faculty, and then in 2000 to the University of California Santa Cruz as a full professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.

The author of nearly 200 research publications, Madau has worked on a broad range of research areas in theoretical astrophysics and cosmology, including the assembly and evolution of massive black holes, the cosmic history of star formation, the reionization and chemical enrichment of the intergalactic medium, the UV and X-ray backgrounds, the dark and light side of galaxy formation, 21-cm cosmology, and substructure lensing.

Madau’s work has received major recognition. He was awarded the AURA Science Prize in 1994,  the von Humboldt Research Prize from the Max Planck Society in 2005, and the Schroedinger Visiting Professorship at the Pauli Center for Theoretical Studies in 2014. Dr. Madau was the Bishop Lecturer at Columbia University (2004), the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Visiting Professor at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge (2009), the Arnold Rosenblum Memorial Lecturer at the Hebrew University (2010), the Bruno Rossi Lecturer at the Arcetri Astronomical Observatory (2014). In 2014 he was selected to receive the Dannie Heineman Prize for outstanding work in astrophysics, the premier recognition granted to mid-career astrophysicists by the American Astronomical Society and the American Institute of Physics.

Dr. Madau has participated in several important leadership roles in astronomy.  In 2010 he served on the Decadal Survey panel on Optical and Infrared Astronomy from the Ground.  He is a regular presence on NASA mission and science advisory committees.  From 2003-2006 he served on the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics Advisory Board and organized several major KITP scientific programs.  He served on review committees for the Deutsche Forschungsgemainschaft and was a member of the ESO E-ELT Science Working Group.  In 2010, he was appointed founding director of the Next Generation Science Institute (NEXSI), a new center at UC Santa Cruz devoted to increasing the role of theoretical simulations in astronomy ground-based telescope mission planning.