Francesco Mattia received his Laurea degree (cum laude) in Physics in 1990 and his Specialization degree (cum laude) in Signal Processing in 1994, both from the University of Bari. From 1990 to 1995, he was awarded research fellowships from CNR-IESI (Bari) and from the Joint Research Center (JRC) of the European Community (Ispra, Italy). At JRC, he worked on the analysis of radar data acquired at the European Microwave Signature Laboratory. Then, he undertook a PhD on microwave remote sensing at CESBIO (Toulouse, France), which was granted (“Avec felicitations du jury”) in 1999 by the University Paul Sabatier. In 1995, he took a temporary position as a research scientist at the CNR-ITIS (Matera), which became permanent in 1997. In 2001, he joined the CNR-ISSIA (Bari) and, in 2006, took the position of a senior research scientist. In 2018, he joined the CNR-IREA and, in March 2020, became the head of Bari Secondary Unit. In January 2021, he was appointed Research Director. Francesco Mattia was visiting scientist at CESBIO (for various periods from 1995 to 2000), at the University of California, Santa Barbara (USA) in 2008 and Ohio State University (USA) in 2011. From 2011 to 2015, he was a member of the ESA's External Science Advisory Committee (ESAC) and, from 2015 to 2019, of the ASI Advisory Committee for Italian Earth Observation Activities in ESA. From 2018 to 2020, he has been a member of the Mission Advisory Group of the G-CLASS/Hydroterra mission selected as a candidate for the ESA Earth Explorer 10 program. His scientific activity mainly concerns the physical interpretation and the modeling of microwave scattering from land surfaces and the inversion of SAR data into land biogeophysical parameters, such as soil moisture content, soil roughness, and vegetation biomass.