Helmut Schober is Director General of the European Spallation Source (ESS), a European intergovernmental laboratory under construction in Lund, Sweden. ESS will probe the atomic structure of materials and molecules using beams of neutrons, with a wide range of applications from engineering to energy to the life sciences. Before moving to ESS Helmut held the position of Director for Institute Laue-Langevin (ILL), he joined the ILL in 1994 as a physicist, became Head of the Time-of Flight – High Resolution Group, then Science Director and German Associate Director in 2011. He studied physics at the University of Regensburg, before going on to the University of Colorado in Boulder (USA) and specializing in the spectroscopy of molecular systems. His research has focused on fullerenes, the dynamics of liquids and glasses and on neutron instrumentation. Helmut Schober is a former chair of the German Committee for Research with Neutrons (KFN), coordinator of the European Neutron and Muon Integrated Infrastructure Initiative (NMI3 – 2009-2013), chair of the” technisch wissenschaftlicher Beirat” of the Helmholtz Institute Geesthacht, Germany (2014-2020). He was founding chair of LENS Initiative (League of advanced European Neutron Sources) from spring 2019 to spring 2021.