Gian Luca Marcialis received his M.Sc. degree and Ph.D. degree in Electronic and Computer Science Engineering from the University of Cagliari, Italy, in 2000 and 2004, respectively.
He is currently Associate Professor of Computer Engineering at University of Cagliari with the national scientific habilitation for full professorship. He is with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering.

Prof. Marcialis is the leader of the PRA Lab's Biometric Unit. PRA Lab was founded in 1998 by Prof. Fabio Roli, currently director of the Lab. Biometrics are behavioral or physiological characteristics of the human being, such as the fingerprint, face, gait, palmprint/palmvein, EEG. On the topics treated by the Biometric Unit, Prof. Marcialis co-authored more than one hundred papers with leading figures of statistical and structural pattern recognition community. The Biometric Unit also maintains a strong connection with national and international institutions, as well as private and public companies, in order to provide the technological transfer of the scientific innovation to their products on the market.

He has founded the International Fingerprint Liveness Detection Competition in 2009. This competition is aimed at establishing the technological state of the art in fingerprint countermeasures against counterfeits named "spoofing" or "presentation" attacks. The competition reached the seventh edition in 2021 and the eighth one is under preparation. Bachelor and master students are welcome in taking part to the competition organization.

He is on the national committee of the Laboratory on Computer Science and Society of the Interuniversitary National Consortium for Computer Science (Consorzio Internuniversitario Nazionale per l'Informatica, CINI).

He is IEEE Senior member and IAPR member. 
He acts as referee for the most widespread international journal and conferences in pattern reconition, computer vision and artificial intelligence.