Elena Conti received her undergraduate degree from the University of Bologna (Italy) and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), followed by post-docs at Washington State University and Harvard. Back in Europe, she has been a Professor at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) for 18 years and was Chair of the Department of Systematic and Evolutionary Botany for six years. She served as elected member of the scientific committee of the UNESCO Diversitas-bioGENESIS program for several years and has been recently elected as Councilor for the Society of Systematic Biologists. She is also Associate Editor for Annals of Botany. At the recent International Botanical Congress in Shenzhen (China) she organized a symposum titled “Evolution of plant reproductive systems: from ecology to genomics”. Elena Conti studies the origin and evolution of biological diversity at different hierarchical scales, from phylogenomics to hybridization and introgression. Her current research program focuses on: 1) Evolution of plant reproductive strategies and their associated floral morphologies, with emphasis on heterostyly in primroses; 2) Biogeography of alpine-arctic and Mediterranean island plants.