Nicola Guarino is research director at the Institute for Cognitive Sciences and Technologies of the Italian National Research Council (ISTC-CNR), where he leads the Laboratory for Applied Ontology (LOA), a section of the Institute located in Trento. Since 1991 he has been playing a leading role in the ontology field, developing a strongly interdisciplinary approach that combines together Computer Science, Philosophy, and Linguistics, and relies on logic as a unifying paradigm. His impact is testified by a long list of widely cited research papers, and many keynote talks and invited tutorials in major conferences involving different communities. Among the best known results of his lab, we have the OntoClean methodology and the DOLCE foundational ontology. Current research interests include ontology-driven conceptual modelling, socio-technical systems, and service science. He is founder and editor-in-chief (with Mark Musen from Stanford University) of the international journal Applied Ontology, and is the founder and was first president of the International Association for Ontology and its Applications, IAOA. He is editorial board member of the International Journal of Semantic Web and Information Systems, the Journal of Data Semantics, and editor of the IOS Press book series Frontiers in AI and Applications. He has been recently nominated ECCAI fellow.