Francesca Figueras works at the University of Barcelona, Spain. Expert in the structure and kinematics of the Galactic disk, she participated in the Hipparcos mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) in the period 1983-1997. Since 1997 she has been involved in the Gaia mission where she currently works on archive validation tasks (CU9). She has been director of 9 doctoral theses, coordinates the Spanish Network of Scientific Exploitation of Gaia (REG) and was president of the Spanish Astronomical Society in the period 2017-2020.