Luca Cardelli was born near Montecatini Terme, Italy, studied at the University of Pisa (until 1978-07-12), and has a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Edinburgh (1982-04-01). He worked at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, from 1982-04-05 to 1985-09-20, and at Digital Equipment Corporation, Systems Research Center in Palo Alto, from 1985-09-30 to 1997-10-31, before assuming a position on 1997-11-03 at Microsoft Research, in Cambridge UK, where he is currently Principal Researcher and head of the Programming Principles and Tools and Security groups.

His main interests are in type theory and operational semantics (for applications to language design, semantics, and implementation), and in concurrency theory (for applications to computer networks and to modeling biological systems). He implemented the first compiler for ML (one of the most popular typed functional language, whose recent incarnations are Caml and F#) and one of the earliest direct-manipulation user-interface editors. He was a member of the Modula-3 design committee, and has designed a few experimental languages, including Obliq: a distributed higher-order scripting language (voted most influential POPL'95 paper 10 years later), and Polyphonic C#, a distributed extension of C#. His more protracted research activity has been in establishing the semantic and type-theoretic foundations of object-oriented languages, resulting in the 1996 book "A Theory of Objects" with Martin Abadi. More recently he has focused on modeling global and mobile computation, via the Ambient Calculus and Spatial Logics, which indirectly led to a current interest in Systems Biology and stochastic systems.

He has published over 100 papers, 1 book, and 2 proceedings as chair/editor (POPL'98 and ECOOP'03). He has served in over 80 Program Committees, and as editor of Theoretical Computer Science - Natural Computing (Elsevier 2008+), Foundations and Trends in Theoretical Computer Science (Now Publishers, 2005+), Transactions in Computational Systems Biology (Springer 2004+), Mathematical Structures in Computer Science (CUP 2001-2007), Science of Computer Programming (North Holland 1999-2006), Journal of Functional Programming (CUP 1995-2004), and Theory and Practice of Object Systems (Wiley 1994-1999).

He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, an ACM Fellow, an Elected Member of the Academia Europaea, an Elected Member of AITO, and a long-standing member of EATCS. In terms of unreliable statistics, he has a Hirsch index of ~58, he is the ~45th most cited computer scientist, and the 3rd most acknowledged computer scientist. His web page is at lucacardelli.name.