After gaining a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pavia, Francesca Frontini began her career in 2010 as a Postdoctoral researcher at the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale (ILC) in Pisa, in the research unit then led by Nicoletta Calzolari. There, she worked on several projects that became key to the LRT field, including FLaReNet, Panacea, Meta-Net and Kyoto. In particular, she was involved in the creation of lexical resources, the definition of standards for data and metadata, and the development of NLP pipelines. The collaboration between ILC and ELRA was and continues to be extensive both in terms of single projects as well as in the organisation of the LREC conferences. It was during this period that ideas such as the LRE map originated and that she developed an interest in the documentation and sharing of Language Resources as our community began to implement practices that very much anticipated what would later become the FAIR principles. It was also in these years that the CLARIN ERIC infrastructure began to establish itself as an important presence in the LRT panorama.

In September 2014, after winning a Fernand Braudel mobility scholarship, she joined the OBVIL laboratory in Paris for 9 months. There she was fortunate to be part of a laboratory where the collaboration between Digital Humanities (DH) and LRT was at its most fruitful, participating and initiating works on stylometric patterns extraction as well as Named Entity Recognition and Linking. This work brought her in contact with an international group of colleagues and led to the creation of a Digital Literary Stylistic SIG within ADHO; she sat on the board from its creation till 2022.

Shortly after her return at ILC in 2015, Italy became a full member of CLARIN ERIC and she was involved in the creation of a national consortium (led by Monica Monachini), acting for a short time as representative in the Centre Committee. In September 2016, she obtained a position as Maitre de Conferences at the Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier III (UPVM) and became part of the Praxiling CNRS lab, while retaining an associate position at ILC. She stayed at UPVM till 2020, and during these years she participated in several projects (in some of these as research unit leader) which were situated in the intersection between corpus linguistics, digital humanities, computational lexicography. Again in this period, she co-edited two important special issues in French journals, one for the TAL journal on NLP and DH and one on Spatial Humanities for Humanités numériques journal. She also became involved in the revision of the ISO-LMF standard thanks to my nomination as an AFNOR and ISO expert. Related to this, she has been involved over the years in W3C activities for the development of the Ontolex Lemon model. Thanks to this experience, she represented France in the CLARIN Standard Committee.

She returned to ILC in Pisa in September 2020 as a tenured researcher, and shortly afterwards became a member of the CLARIN ERIC Board of Directors. In this capacity, she participates in the governance of the infrastructure with a special focus on user involvement (with the organisation of initiatives such as the CLARIN cafés) but also, more and more, the European Open Science Cloud (EOSC). In particular, she participated in the SSHOC cluster project (building strong links with the other infrastructures of our domain, in particular DARIAH and CESSDA) and am a member of the EOSC task force on Data Stewardship. Recently, she has been active in defining the role and contribution of CLARIN within the future Language Data Space. As a member of the CLARIN-IT team, she is a work package leader in the development of H2IOSC, a new national research infrastructure for the humanities and heritage.

Today Francesca is an established member of the LRT community, and author of over 100 publications. Over the years she has participated in the organisation of several editions of LREC, co-organised related workshops and was a member of scientific committees of various conferences in our field. She has cultivated a strong network of international relationships, and am regularly invited for talks and panels. Finally, she has supervised MA and PhD theses, and is a lecturer at the Universities of Montpellier and Calabria, teaching about Language Resources creation and documentation in two Scientific Data Management masters.

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