Licia Verde is an Italian cosmologist and theoretical physicist and currently ICREA Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Barcelona.

Her research interests include large-scale structure, dark energy, inflation and the cosmic microwave background.

She received a Laurea degree in 1996 from University of Padua and a PhD in 2000 from the University of Edinburgh. She did postdoctoral study at Princeton University and joined the faculty of The University of Pennsylvania in 2003. From September 2007, Verde is an ICREA Professor at the ICCUB of the University of Barcelona. She was a Professor II at the University of Oslo during the period 2013-2016. Verde was editor of the Physics of the Dark Universe Journal and is currently editor of the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. As of January 2019 she is the chair of the science advisory board of the arXiv.

She is known primarily for work on large-scale structure, analysis of the WMAP data and development of rigorous statistical tools to analyze surveys of the universe.