Cristina Ferrandiz leads the Evolution and Development of Carpels and Fruits lab at the Instituto de Biología Molecular and Celular de Plantas (IBMCP) in Valencia, Spain, since 2002. She obtained a PhD in Biology working in MADS box genes in pea under Jose Pio Beltrán’s supervision at IBMCP in 1996. Then she did 4 years postdoctoral work with Marty Yanofsky at UCSanDiego, where she worked on different aspects of reproductive developmental biology in Arabidopsis, and two additional years back in Spain at UPM in Madrid and UMH in Alicante before she got her current position. One of the main lines of her research is to understand how fruit patterning is established, and what is the molecular basis of the morphological and functional diversity found in Nature, working in the characterization of the main regulatory networks that drive tissue formation and how they have evolved to adapt to different seed dispersal strategies. More recently, she has also become interested in the study of global proliferative arrest, a general phenomenon that controls life-span in monocarpic plants, and defined a genetic network that regulates the maintenance of stem cells in the meristems and thus the duration and amount of fruit production before plant senescence and death. This research has translated into biotechnological tools that greatly improve yield in different crop species such as Brassicaceae or legumes.