Sakura Pascarelli Dr Sakura Pascarelli received a Laurea in Physics at the University La Sapienza, Rome, Italy, and a PhD in Physics at the University Joseph Fourier, Grenoble, France. She has been involved with synchrotron radiation instrumentation and research for over 30 years. After joining the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF, Grenoble, France) in 1993, her research focused on studies of matter at extreme conditions of pressure and temperature using X-ray spectroscopies. She was in charge of the x-ray absorption spectroscopy beamlines ID24 (1997-2019) and BM23 (2000-2019), Head of the Electronic Structure and Magnetism Group (2012-2015) and Head of the Matter at Extremes Group (2015-2019). She is presently Scientific Director at European XFEL. She served as Secretary of the AIRAPT from 2013 to 2019, was elected Vice President in 2019 and President in 2023. E-mail: sakura.pascarelli@xfel.eu.