**Sara Venafra**

Sara Venafra, (Ph.D.) is a technologist at the Italian Space Agency since 2022. During her academic studies and working experiences, Sara Venafra has worked on several Topics, all of which were mainly concerned with remote sensing. Sara Venafra received his master's degree in electronic engineering at the Telecommunications Program of Study from the Politecnico of Bari in 2010. At the beginning of her career, she focused her research activities on sea surface wind speed retrieval using SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite data and its applications in the fields of renewable energies with the development of algorithms. She applied this software to estimate the sea surface wind field from the SAR satellite data in the X (Cosmo-SkyMed) and C (ERS and ENVISAT) bands, and to evaluate the energy production of an offshore wind farm on the basis of wind model retrieved from SAR satellite data analysis. During her Ph.D. (2011–2015) and post-doc positions at Universita degli ` Studi della Basilicata she worked on *Applied Spectroscopy* Topics, developing Level 2 processors for the inversion of the thermodynamic state of the Earth's atmosphere via the use of physical radiative transfer models. She currently works on the development of a fast radiative transfer model and relative inverse module for the retrieval of state vectors in all-sky conditions (cloudy and clear sky) in the Far-InfraRed spectral band (FIR, 100-667 cm-1), also giving information about the microphysical properties of clouds by exploiting the next ESA mission, FORUM (Far-infrared Outgoing Radiation Understanding and Monitoring). She is a co-investigator in various projects in the area of high spectral resolution infrared sounders from satellites (far and thermal, from 100 to 12 micron). She was a visiting and associate scientist at EUMETSAT headquarters. She has published her research in more than 40 publications, acting as a reviewer for several International Journals of remote sensing, physics, and atmospheric science.
