Full professor of Linguistics at the Faculty of Education, Silvia Dal Negro has studied foreign languages and literatures at the university of Bergamo and has obtained a PhD in linguistics at Pavia. Before starting her job at unibz she has been tenured researcher at the Università del Piemonte Orientale. She is now active especially in the domains of language education and contact linguistics focussing in particular on minority languages in the Alpine space. She is president of the Italian Association for Applied Linguistics (AItLA)