Francisco J Blanco obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the Complutense University of Madrid in 1992. As a predoc at IEM-CSIC, he used NMR to characterize linear peptides folding into β-hairpins. As a postdoc at EMBL, he studied the structure and folding of the spectrin SH3 domain, and at NIH, he used solid-state NMR to study the structure of HIV-Rev protein fibers. He moved back to CSIC in 2000 and determined the solution structure of a protein with a novel fold. He joined the CNIO in 2002 as a Ramón y Cajal researcher, where he studied tumor suppressor ING4 and several meganucleases. In 2007 he moved to CIC bioGUNE as IKERBASQUE Research Professor to work on the structure-function of proteins relevant to cancer until 2020, when he relocated his lab to CIB-CSIC. He has authored 130 publications with more than 5700 citations and an h-index of 42. He has supervised 9 Ph.D. Thesis, and is an Honorary Professor of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.