Professor Andrea Sottoriva obtained his BSc in computer science from the University of Bologna in 2006 and his MSc in computational modelling from the University of Amsterdam in 2008.

While attending his BSc and master's he worked in neutrino physics at the Department of Physics of the University of Bologna and at the Institute for Nuclear and High Energy Physics (NIKHEF) in the Netherlands as a research assistant.

During his master's he specialised in computational biology and bioinformatics and became interested in mathematical modelling of cancer. This emerging field employs rigorous mechanistic modelling and simulations to understand complex biological systems such as cancer.