Marcos Valdes, Scientific Director of VIS, has been for 8 years a research fellow at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. After graduating in Physics at the University of Florence, he obtained his PhD at the International School of Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste. He then carried out research on subjects such as Dark Matter and structure formation in the very early Universe at the “Institute for the Mathematics and Physics of the Universe” (IPMU) in Tokyo and at the Scuola Normale Superiore. He became coordinator of the Scuola Normale Outreach program in 2014. Since then he focused on innovative methods for science dissemination, winning the Outreach National Prize given by the Italian Physics Society in 2015. He is among the founders of the startup VIS in 2019.