Roberto Piazza earned an M.Sc. degree in physics from the University of Milan in 1981 and a Ph.D. in quantum electronics from the University of Pavia in 1987. Since 2005, he has been a professor of Condensed Matter Physics at Milano Politecnico. He has also been an invited professor at Ecole Normale Superieure Lyon (2011), Cambridge University (2013), and Utrecht University (2015). He has been the principal investigator of the ESA project 'Colloidal Solids' and the principal investigator of the NASA ACE T10 Mission on board the International Space Station. The research he performed has inspired him to write a rather general interest book on soft matter physics published by Springer in Italian, English, and Chinese.