Francisco J. M. Mojica graduated in Biology (University of Valencia, 1986) and after completing his doctoral thesis on the response of halophilic archaea to environmental stress (University of Alicante and Université Paris-Sud, France, 1993), he undertook his first postdoctoral stay at the University of Utah (the USA, 1993), where he researched bacterial physiology, followed by a second stay at the University of Oxford (the UK, 1995-1996) to work on gene regulation and DNA topology. In 1997, he returned to the University of Alicante as a senior lecturer in Microbiology and founded the Molecular Microbiology research group, focused on the study of CRISPR systems.