Chiara Cassarini was born in 1987 in Bologna, Italy. She completed her bachelor (BSc) in 2010 in Industrial Chemistry at the University of Bologna (Italy) and obtained her MSc degree in Geochemistry at Utrecht University (the Netherlands). She collaborated closely with the Deltares Company in the Netherlands and with the department of Isotope Biogeochemistry in Leipzig (UFZ) Germany where she used compound-specific stable isotope analysis (CSIA) to investigate the degradation of chlorinated compounds in an industrial contaminated site. Simultaneously, during her MSc studies, she participated in a research cruise on the North Sea to investigate ocean acidification. Chiara got admitted into the Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate Program on Environmental Technologies for Contaminated Solids, Soils and Sediment (ETeCoS3). She started as a PhD fellow at UNESCO-IHE (Delft, the Netherlands) in 2013. Within the framework of her PhD studies, she investigated how various sulfur compounds, as electron acceptors, impact the anaerobic oxidation of methane in packed bed systems. Chiara has started a Post-Doc in anaerobic biotechnology and process bioengineering at the National University of Ireland Galway, the research is focused on new environmental technologies designed to produce biofuel from waste.