Paola Caselli studied astronomy and molecular spectroscopy at the University of Bologna, where she obtained her PhD in Astronomy in 1994, after extensive work in the United States at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

She became Researcher at the Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri (Florence, Italy) in 1995. In 2006-2007 she obtained a visiting lecturer scholarship at Harvard University, where she taught astronomy to undergraduate students and star & planet formation to PhD students. She became Professor of Astronomy at the University of Leeds in 2007.

After receiving an ERC Advanced Grant in 2012, she then moved to the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in 2014, as Director and founder of the new MPE department, the Center for Astrochemical Studies (CAS), and Honorary Professor at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

In 2018, Caselli was the Jubilee Professor at Chalmers University of Technology. Between 2019 and 2021 she was Hasselblad Guest Professor at the Onsala Space Observatory and, since 2020, Blaauw Professor at the University of Groningen. The main objectives of CAS are chemical and physical processes in star and planet forming regions. CAS has four laboratories where transient and stable molecules, as well as ices and particles of interstellar interest are studied.

Photo credit: Axel Griesch (Max Planck Society)