Sara Castiglioni is the Head of the Environmental Biomarkers Unit in the Environmental Health Department at the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research IRCCS in Milan. She got a master degree in Biological Sciences in 2000 and a PhD in Analytical Chemistry in 2006 at the University of Insubria in collaboration with the Mario Negri Institute. She worked during the PhD at The University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia and had later a post-Doc fellowship at the Mario Negri Institute in Milan, Italy. Since 2008, she is working as a researcher at the Mario Negri Institute. She is working in the environmental chemistry field monitoring occurrence and fate of several classes of emerging contaminants in the environment (including antibiotics) and evaluating their biological and environmental effects including the presence of resistance genes in the environment. Her research group was pioneer in the development of the innovative approach wastewater based epidemiology (WBE), i.e. the use of wastewater analysis to study habits and consumption of selected substances (i.e. illicit drugs, pharmaceuticals, alcohol, nicotine, caffeine) in the population producing wastewater. She is working to improve and optimize the methodology and to develop novel applications aimed at studying human exposure to environmental and health contaminants, and the health status of a population. She is author of about 120 peer-reviewed articles, 1 books as editor and was in the organizing committee of five international conferences in the field of WBE. She gave over 15 invited keynote presentations at international meetings.