Claudia Maraston is a Professor of Astrophysics at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation of the University of Portsmouth. Her field of research is the formation and evolution of galaxies. She obtained her PhD at the University of Bologna (Italy, 1998), after which she has been research fellow at the Ludwig-Maximillian University of Munich (Germany) and at the Max-Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Garching, Germany). In 2004 she was awarded a Marie Curie Fellowiship which she took to Oxford University and in 2007 a ERC Marie Curie Excellence Grant which she took to Portsmouth University. Claudia was awarded the 2018 Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for ‘work of outstanding merit in theoretical astrophysics’, being only the second woman to obtain the award in the 80-year history of the medal. In 2022 she was included by research.com in the top 1000 physicists worldwide and the top 1000 female scientists (i.e. all scientific disciplines included, worldwide). Claudia has authored over 200 peer-reviewed publications and sat on distinguished international boards, including the NASA Hubble Space Telescope, the Finnish Academy of Science, the European Southern Observatory. She is a member of the editorial board of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and has been invited scientist at numerous institutions worldwide, including Yale university, Caltech, the Einstein Institute of Hannover, Leiden University, the Carnegie Observatory of Pasadena.