Dr Serena Carpentieri obtained a master’s degree in food engineering at the University of Salerno in February 2019. During the preparation of the master thesis entitled “Comparison among different non-conventional extraction techniques for green solvent recovery of bioactive compounds from Mediterranean aromatic herbs”, she spent a period at the Faculty of Food Technology and Biotechnology of the University of Zagreb (Croatia) within an Erasmus student mobility program. Dr Serena Carpentieri obtained her doctoral degree in industrial engineering, curriculum in chemical engineering, at the University of Salerno in April 2023. During the preparation of her thesis entitled “Functionalization of pasta through the incorporation of active ingredients of natural origins", she studied the fundamental aspects related to pasta production, analyzing the different unit operations involved in the process and other aspects such as energy consumption and waste management. In March 2023, she spent a one-month research stay at the premises of the Department of Biotechnology and Food Analysis of Wroclaw University of Economics and Business under the PROM (NAWA) program, where she studied the use of insect flours to functionalize durum wheat pasta. Currently, she works as a post-doc fellow at the Department of Industrial Engineering at the University of Salerno as part of the project AgriTech “Valorizzazione di biomassa agroalimentare mediante trattamenti innovativi”.