Francesca Peri was born in Venice and graduated from the University of Padova with a degree in biology. For her PhD, she moved to Cologne, Germany, where she worked with Siegfried Roth on the establishment of embryonic polarity in Drosophila. After obtaining her PhD in 2001, she joined the lab of Christiane Nuesslein-Volhard at the Max-Plank Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen (Germany). As a postdoctoral fellow, she began studying how microglia, the brain’s immune cells, engulf and digest dying neurons. Having become a group leader at EMBL in Heidelberg in 2008, Francesca moved to the University of Zürich in 2018 as a full professor.