Diletta Martinelli was born in Ferrara, a small city in the north of Italy. She studied there for her Bachelor in Pure Mathematics but then went to Pavia and Barcelona for the master. Martinelli moved to London at the end of 2012 to start a PhD in Algebraic Geometry at Imperial College where she graduated at the end of 2016. After that she moved to Edinburgh and then Berkeley for her postdoc, before arriving in Amsterdam at the end of 2019. In the past few years she has been involved in many projects about mathematics in developing countries and has had the privilege to keep travelling the world and meet amazing and brilliant students.

Martinelli was the first winner of the AYA Recognition & Reward Award for Societal Impact for her engagement with fostering mathematics in the global south. Read more about that here.