 Michele Parinello was born in Messina (Sicily) and received his "Laurea" in physics from the University of Bologna in 1968.After working at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, the IBM research laboratory in Zurich, and the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, he was appointed Professor of Computational Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich in 2001, a position he also holds at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano.In 2004 he was elected to Great Britain's Royal Society.