Professor Franca Fraternali received her PhD in Physical Chemistry from the University of Naples, spending part of the PhD at the Polytechnic of Zurich (ETH). After post-doctoral experiences at the ETH and at the EMBL in Heidelberg, in the year 2000, she became staff scientist at the Mathematical Biology Division of the National Institute for Medical Research in London.

In 2012 she was awarded the Chair of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. The group develops computational methods and large-scale data analysis tools for Structural Biology of Proteins and Nucleic acids; Systems Biology; Molecular Dynamics of folded and misfolded proteins; Statistical Analysis of Protein Interaction Networks.

In November 2022, Franca took up the position of Director of the Institute of Structural and Molecular Biology (a joint Institute between UCL and Birkbeck) and a Chair in the Division of Biosciences at UCL.