Maurizio Salaris is Professor of Stellar Astrophysics at the Liverpool John Moores University (UK), and works mainly on stellar evolution modelling, the study of Milky Way and extragalactic stellar populations. He was born in Rome, Italy, at the height of the space race, and grew up absorbing a healthy dose of TV footage of astronauts going into space and walking on the Moon, science-fiction series, movies and books, and space music from Germany and England. The final outcome of this upbringing was an early decision to become an astrophysicist (while playing drums in a band and doing athletics on the side), after toying with the ideas to be either a bus driver or a professional athlete. After studying physics at La Sapienza University in Rome, he worked at what is now named Osservatorio Astronomico d'Abruzzo (Italy), the Institute for Space Studies of Catalonia (Spain), and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics (Germany, as a Marie Curie Fellow), before spending the last 28 years at the Astrophysics Research Institute of the Liverpool John Moores University. Prof. Salaris has published 270 papers in peer-reviewed astrophysics journals, plus dozens of conference proceedings. On the side, he enjoyed writing the textbooks Evolution of stars and stellar populations (Wiley, 2008), Old stellar populations (Wiley-VCH, 2013), the first edition of this Age-dating stars: From the Sun to distant galaxies (Taylor and Francis 2021), and more recently, an entry (on white dwarf structure and evolution) in the Encyclopaedia of Astrophysics (Elsevier, 2025). He also had fun writing, starring, and co-producing a series of educational science fiction short videos.

Prof. Salaris is a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Higher Education Academy (UK), a member of the International Astronomical Union and the European Astronomical Society, and Associate Editor of Astronomy & Astrophysics, one of the top peer-reviewed international astrophysics journals.