Caterina Petrillo, President

Full Professor of Experimental Condensed Matter Physics at the University of Perugia, where she served as Director of the Department of Physics for five years (2009–2014) and as Director of the Department of Physics and Geology for three years (2014–2017). Since February 2021, she is President of Area Science Park.

From January 2022 to November 2024, she served as a member of the Board of Directors of ENEA (the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development), and since July 2022, she has been elected Vice President of the Board. In June 2021, she was elected Chair of the General Assembly of the Extreme Light Infrastructure ELI-ERIC serving from 2021 to 2024, and in 2015 she was elected Vice President of the Council of the European Spallation Source (ESS), serving from 2015 to 2017.

Trained as a physicist, she began her career as a researcher in condensed matter, getting specific expertise in neutron scattering techniques, and later synchrotron light scattering techniques, available at major European research infrastructures, such as the high-flux nuclear reactor HIFAR at the Institut Laue-Langevin (ILL) in Grenoble (France), the spallation neutron source ISIS in Didcot (UK), the medium-flux nuclear reactor Orphée in Saclay (France), the HIFAR nuclear reactor in Sydney (Australia), and the European ynchrotron light sources ESRF in Grenoble, Elettra synchrotron, and the FERMI free-electron laser in Trieste. Through international collaborations, she contributed to the design and construction of several instruments installed at the ILL nuclear reactor, the ISIS and ESS neutron sources, as well as devices and detectors for neutron research.

She has served on international evaluation and strategic advisory committees of numerous research centers and major European infrastructures, including the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble, the German Electron Synchrotron DESY in Hamburg, and the Forschungszentrum Jülich. She has been a member of the H2020-RI Advisory Group, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC-WG Training & Skills) expert group and the PSE expert group of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). During the Seventh Framework Programme (2007–2014) she was the Italian Delegate to the European Commission Program Committee for Research Infrastructures. She also served as a member of the Italian delegation to ESFRI (2018–2021), the Italian delegate to the Steering Committee of the Institut Laue-Langevin in Grenoble (2002–2009), and as a member of the Italian Delegation to the G7-5 Group of Senior Officers on Global Research Infrastructures. She is a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (Kungliga Ingenjörsvetenskapsakademien / IVA).