Francesco Sette Director General of European Synchrotron Research Facility - ESRF Address: CS 40220, 38043 Grenoble, Cedex 9, France E-mail: sette@esrf.fr URL: http://www.esrf.eu

Expertise : Francesco Sette, Director General of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) since 1 January 2009, was born in Rome in 1957. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Rome obtained in 1982, and has been performing research in condensed matter with synchrotron radiation since then. After graduation, he spent eight years at the AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill (USA) and joined the ESRF in 1991. Twenty years ago, he co-invented the world’s first high energy resolution, high intensity soft X-ray source, which quickly found its way into many synchrotron light facilities throughout the world. Later, as a group leader at the ESRF, he developed a new generation of inelastic X-ray scattering beam lines, which made possible the study of atomic motions and electronic properties of condensed matter using X-rays. He has published approximately 200 scientific publications in refereed journals. He is fully involved in the operation and upgrade of the ESRF and in the establishment of the long-term strategic mission of this European Facility in the European and Worldwide contexts of analytical large scale infrastructures dedicated to research on condensed matter, materials and living matter. He is actively promoting a global reflection and study for a new generation of diffraction limited high energy photon sources required for the next steps in fundamental and applied discovery in areas such as energy, health and information technology research.