As head of the experimental Division and scientific director of Alba, I’m responsible for managing the experimental division of the national Spanish synchrotron light source, creating together with my colleagues the scientific vision for the facility, and implement the tactical plan into the operations of the division. Since my early career as beamline scientist at HASYLAB/DESY, APS/ANL, and later at BNL/NSLS-II, I have focused on the development of new user programs by advancing instrumentation. Next to high heat-load optics developments for primary focusing and fluorescence collimation, I’m also involved in electronics and detector developments; in collaboration with my colleagues from high energy physics, astrophysics and various industrial partners, innovative technologies are developed for single photon and particle detection.Scientifically, I’m interested in the correlations between structure of matter and its functional behavior, especially in the areas of catalysis, energy storage, and materials growth. Developing methods which visualize the structure and at the same time show the causality between a structure change and the function is the approach I have chosen. First results indicate that this can be achieved by combining a multimodal experimental approach with a systematic comparison with theoretical ab initio calculations and simulations. Modern database approaches with data provenance, machine learning mechanism and deep learning play an important role.