Luciano Colombo received his doctoral degree in physics from the University of Pavia (I) in 1989 and then he was a post-doc at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (CH) and at the International School for Advanced Studies (I). He became assistant professor (tenured) at the University of Milano (I) in 1990, next moving to the University of Milano-Bicocca (I) in 1996 for an equivalent position.

Since 2002 he is full professor of theoretical condensed matter physics at the University of Cagliari (I) and since 2015 fellow of the ``Istituto Lombardo - Accademia di Scienze e Lettere'' (Milano, I). He has been visiting scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Livermore, CA, USA), University College Dublin (Eire), Catalan Institute for Nanoscience and Nanotechnology (Spain), and Barcelona Institute for Materials Science (ICMAB-CSIC, Spain). He has been the principal investigator of several research projects addressed to solid-state and materials physics problems, the supervisor of 80+ students (at bachelor, master, and Ph.D. level), and the mentor of 20+ post-docs. He is the author, or coauthor, of 280 scientific articles and 9 books.