Alfonso Martinez-Arias is a Professor of Developmental Mechanics at the University of Cambridge since 2003. After obtaining his PhD from the Dpt. of Biophysics and Theoretical Biology at the University of Chicago, he moved to a postdoctoral position at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge in 1983. The research in his lab is devoted to investigate the structure and the function of Living Matter with a special focus on the processes that generate tissues and organs from single cells through interactions between protein and gene regulatory networks.