Lucio Mayer was born and raised in Milan, with an education grounded in classical studies. He studied Physics at the Universita’ Milano-Bicocca, then obtained a PhD in Astronomy working at Milan, Durham, and the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics. In 2001, Lucio became a postdoc at the University of Washington, home of the N-Body shop. He was Zwicky Fellow at ETH Zurich in 2005 and became SNF professor at the University of Zurich in 2006, and stayed on as a professor at the Institute of Computational Science, which he helped founding. With his wife and two daughters, Lucio travels around the world and enjoys life.