Francesca Rivas Cuestas holds a Bachelor’s degree in Bioengineering from Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC), Peru. During her undergraduate studies, she completed an internship at the Curie Institute in France and later joined KAUST as a Visiting Student, where she worked on reconstituting a phase separation system using optogenetics. After defending her thesis, she rejoined the Chromatin Biochemistry group as a research consultant, studying the molecular mechanisms of hpl-2 in C. elegans both in vitro and in vivo. She also carried out computational analyses of protein structures and image datasets. Francesca is currently pursuing a Master’s in Bioscience at KAUST.