Valerio Scarani was born in Milan in 1972. He graduated from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in 1996 and received his doctorate in physics from the same institution in 2000. He then moved to the University of Geneva, where he started working on quantum information science, notably quantum cryptography and Bell nonlocality. In 2007 he joined the National University of Singapore, as a member of the Physics Department and Principal Investigator at the Centre for Quantum Technologies.