Francina Langa Vives was born in Barcelona (Spain). She obtained her PhD in Chemistry (Biochemistry) in 1995 at the Universitat Central de Barcelona for her thesis work on the characterization of a human pancreatic oncofoetal protein in biological fluids, tissues and tumour cells.
From 1996 to 1999 she was a postdoctoral fellow (EEC grant) at the Institut Pasteur in the Unité de Biologie du Développement, directed by Charles Babinet, one of the pioneers of transgenesis in France. During this time she started to work with ES cells and homologous recombination techniques for the study of regulation of the proto-oncogene c-myc, together with the search of a phenotype for vimentin null mice including the induction of teratocarcinomas from ES cells lacking this intermediate filament.
From 1999 to 2002 she joined the group of Lluis Montoliu in the National Center for Biotechnology (CNB-CSIC) in Madrid (Spain) as a postdoctoral researcher, where she implemented her experience in BAC transgenesis and morula aggregation techniques together with the generation and the phenotype analysis of mutant mice for Sigma receptors (in collaboration with the pharmaceutical company Esteve Laboratories, Barcelona, Spain).
In June 2002 she was recruited at the Institut Pasteur to create the transgenesis core facility.
Since 2003 she has been Head of the Mouse Genetics Engineering Center at the Institut Pasteur.