Alessandro Minelli was Professor of Zoology at the University of Padova until his retirement in 2011. He previously served as the Speciality Chief Editor for evolutionary developmental biology for the journal, Frontiers in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. He was previously Vice-President of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology. Having studied animals for the majority of his career, on retirement he decided to study plant evolutionary development. He is the author of Biological Systematics (1993), The Development of Animal Form (2003), Forms of Becoming (2009), Perspectives in Animal Phylogeny and Evolution (2009), Plant Evolutionary Developmental Biology (2018), The Biology of Reproduction (2019, with Giuseppe Fusco), and Understanding Development (2021).