Leonardo Candela is computer science senior researcher at the National Research Council of Italy, Istituto di Scienza e Tecnologie dell’Informazione “A. Faedo”. His research interests are driven by the development of systems and services supporting research infrastructures for science. In particular, he is intertwining virtual research environments, data infrastructures, collaborative working environments, reference models for complex systems, information retrieval, data analytics, data publishing and innovative scholarly communication practices. His research activity is developed by closely connecting research and development. In fact, he has been involved in several EU-funded projects called to develop Digital Libraries & Data Infrastructures and he is the Strategy and Portfolio Manager of the D4Science.org infrastructure.