​Helena Fernández is an Associate Professor in Plant Physiology at the University of Oviedo, Spain. Her research focuses on the study of seedless plants, and ferns in particular. She received her PhD in Biology in 1993 from Oviedo University, followed by a EU-funded postgraduate research sojourn at the INRA in Orléans, France, under Patrick Dumas, training in chromatography and mass spectrometry techniques. She has also been a researching fellow under the Regional Research Plan of the Principality of Asturias (FICYT), in 1997, and the Ramón y Cajal National Excellence Research Program, to study plant reproduction, opening a new line of research on the use of fern gametophytes as an experimental system. In addition, she has been a guest researcher at the Institute of Plant Biology, University of Zurich, working on apomixes under Prof. Grossniklaus in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2019. Such regular collaboration has allowed her to become acquaintance with omics techniques, to deepen on sexual and asexual plant behaviour, and to envisage the implementation of asexuality conducts in sexual crop species. Beyond her teaching and research, she has served as Academic Secretariat at the Faculty of Biology of the University of Oviedo. She is an active member of the Spanish Society of Plant Physiology and the Spanish Society of In-Vitro Plant Cells and Tissues, and she publishes regularly in relevant journals, having edited and contributed to a number of study collections with Springer and others.