Dr Cinzia Casiraghi received her BSc and MSc in Nuclear Engineering from Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and her PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cambridge (UK) in 2006. In 2005 she was awarded with an Ernest Oppenheimer Early Career Research Fellowship, followed by the Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship in 2007 and the prestigious Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, won in 2008. This Prize is given to young, cutting-edge researchers, providing them with risk capital to pursue innovative projects and establish their own lab at a very early stage in their careers. This allowed her to become a Junior Group Leader at the Physics Department of the Free University Berlin (Germany). From 2010 she is also a permanent Staff member of the School of Chemistry, at the University of Manchester (UK), where she has been appointed as lecturer in graphene’s chemistry. She is also member of the Athena Swan committee of the School of Chemistry.