I am the director of the PhD program in Astrophysics at my University. This allows me to shape an exciting program that can attract the best young scientists worldwide to our team. Acknowledging that research is best done when embedded in a vibrant environment, my role as a director is to look after 20 students and their supervisors working on a variety of topics in astrophysics, from the solar system to the very distant galaxies and supermassive black holes. I am also the director of the Millennium Nucleus ERIS, which is a very competitive research grant consisting of various PIs collaborating to form young scientists, do innovative science and impact society. I closely collaborate with theoreticians on galaxy formation, mathematicians on tree and network structures, and biologists on micro and macroevolution. Together we generate a solid interdisciplinary network and guide about 15 young researchers to work on test cases which help to develop new methods based on phylogenetic techniques that are applicable to galaxy evolution. Finally, I am one of the co-founder of the international and well-recognized Gaia benchmark stars project. This is fundamental work to calibrating and setting the scale for stellar properties which are needed when the observations are used to interpret theoretical models. This is an essential task in astronomy. As a leader I actually spend most of my time working for a variety of graduate students and postdocs, by helping them in their projects, guiding them in their career, managing the various budgets to maximize their scientific potential, and learning from their research.