Mercè Figueras Vall·llosera (born in Banyoles on 1968) is a researcher of the Laboratori del Suro (cork lab) in the Science Faculty (Universitat de Girona). The thesis was supervised by Profesor Montserrat Pagès (Molecular Genetics Department, CID-CSIC Barcelona, presently CRAG) (1992-1996). This work showed the capacity of maize Rab17 to provide tolerance against water stress in Arabidopsis. She got the PhD grade on 1997 by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. On 2001 she got a full-time professor contract to work in the Biology Department (Cell Biology area) at the Universitat de Girona. She started a new research line in the cork lab to understand the molecular Biology of cork formation, the periderm and the phellem. Since then, she is focused on the periderm and phellem of cork oak, potato and Arabidopsis. Her main contributions in this field have been the analysis of cork transcriptomes, the periderm of potato tuber and the funcional characterization of some suberin biosynthetic and regulatory genes in the potato tuber periderm. On 2022, she did a 6 month stay at the lab of Professor Wolfgang Busch (Salk Institute, La Jolla, California).