Andrea Alù received the Laurea, MS and PhD degrees from the University of Roma Tre, Italy, respectively in 2001, 2003 and 2007. After spending one year as a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, in 2009 he joined the faculty of the University of Texas at Austin. Alù is a Distinguished Professor at the City University of New York (CUNY), the Einstein Professor of Physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, and the Founding Director of the Photonics Initiative at the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center. Since 2014, Alù has been also serving as Chief Technology Officer of Silicon Audio RF Circulator, a company that holds the exclusive license of two inventions from Alù’s lab at UT Austin: magnetic-free circulators for sound and radio waves.

He is the co-author of an edited book on optical antennas, over 20 book chapters, over 500 conference papers, and over 350 journal papers, among which are several high-impact publications with a large number of citations to date. His findings on metamaterials, plasmonics and cloaking are regularly highlighted in the general press, with recent appearences on BBC, CNN, NBC and several others.

Alù has received several scientific awards and recognitions from various technical societies, including the NSF Alan T. Waterman award (2015), the Edith and Peter O’Donnell Award in Engineering from TAMEST (2016), the ICO Prize in Optics (2016), Optica's Adolph Lomb Medal (2013), the URSI Issac Koga Gold Medal (2011), the 2014 Outstanding Young Engineer Award from the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society, the inaugural Franco Strazzabosco Award, the Medal of Representation of the President of the Republic of Italy (2013), the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Optics (2013), the SPIE Early Career Investigator Award (2012), an NSF CAREER award (2010), the AFOSR and the DTRA Young Investigator Awards (2010, 2011). Alù is a Fellow of Optica, IEEE, SPIE, and APS, and a full member of URSI. He serves on the Editorial Board of Physical Review B, Advanced Optical Materials, and New Journal of Physics, and as an Associate Editor of five journals, including the IEEE Antennas and Wireless Propagation Letters and Optics Express. He has also guest edited special issues for a number of journals. He has been elected an APS Outstanding Referee by the editors of Physical Review and Physical Review Letters, served as IEEE AP-S Distinguished Lecturer since 2014, as OSA Traveling Lecturer since 2010, and as the IEEE joint AP-S and MTT-S chapter chair for Central Texas.

In 2024, Alù was selected as the recipient of Optica's Max Born Award, "For pioneering contributions to linear, nonlinear and nonreciprocal photonic metamaterials."