Sandro Sorella has been a professor in physics at the Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati in Trieste, Italy, since 2005 and a senior visiting scientist at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan, since 2013. His scientific activity has been devoted to the study of strongly correlated electron systems by advanced numerical simulation techniques based on quantum Monte Carlo, and has covered several topics, such as quantum spin liquids, high-temperature superconductivity, hydrogen at high pressures and several carbon-based compounds, such as graphene and nanotubes. He has developed several efficient algorithms for describing the ground state properties of correlated systems, from the auxiliary field quantum Monte Carlo during his Ph.D. (1989), to stochastic optimization methods (stochastic reconfiguration in 1998) for variational Monte Carlo and the alleviation of the so called ‘fermion sign problem.’ Moreover, starting in 2008, he has been the pioneer developer of efficient molecular dynamics and structure optimization methods for the electronic simulation of material properties by quantum Monte Carlo.