Fernando Villafañe was born in Valladolid, Spain. His first job as chemist was in «Maybridge Chemical Co. Ltd.», Tintagel (Cornwall, U.K.) during two summers in 1981 and 1982, synthesizing organic compounds of pharmacological interest. He received his PhD at the Universidad de Valladolid in 1989 after working on bis(diphenylphosphino)methane bridging dimolybdenum complexes under the supervision of Prof. Víctor Riera and Prof. Miguel A. Ruiz (Universidad de Oviedo). After a postdoctoral stay as Fulbright fellow studying thiolate bridging diiron complexes at MIT (Cambridge, USA) with Prof. Dietmar Seyferth, he returned to Valladolid. Here he was appointed «Profesor Titular» in 1993, and joined Prof. Pablo Espinet’s group working on polypyridyl molybdenum complexes and fluoromesityl palladium and gold complexes. He joined Prof. Daniel Miguel’s group in 1999. His research interests include different aspects of transition metal chemistry, such as complexes containing pyrazoles or ligands containing pyrazole fragments, cyclopalladated complexes containing silicon (in collaboration with Prof. Carsten Strohmann, Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany), or transition metal organometallic complexes (in collaboration with Prof. Michael Knorr, Université de Franche-Comté, France). He has made short stays at the Universities of Bristol (UK), Würzburg (Germany), and Franche-Comté (France). He is the Dean of the Faculty of Sciences (Facultad de Ciencias, Universidad de Valladolid, http://www.cie.uva.es/) from 2008 until 2016. Since february 2009 he is the President of the «Asociación de Químicos de Castilla y León» (http://www.quimicoscyl.org/). In september 2009 he obtained the Accreditation for Full Professor («Catedrático»), and got the Professorship in 2016.