The work of François Parcy contributes to answer several fundamental questions: where do flowering plants come from, and how can we explain their successful colonization of the Earth? François Parcy's studies have contributed to the understanding of the process of floral morphogenesis and explain how the transcription factor LEAFY controls the construction of the flower. One of his latest works has allowed to understand how LEAFY builds the shape of Romanesco cabbage by combining mathematical modeling and plant genetics.

François Parcy was also awarded the CNRS bronze medal in 2002 and the Roger-Jean et Chantal Gautheret "Grand Prix Thématique" by the French Academy of Sciences for his work on transcription factors controlling seeds and floral development in 2010.
After joining the CNRS in 1998 in Jérôme Giraudat's team at the Institut des sciences du végétal, he moved to the Plant and Cell Physiology laboratory at the CEA-Grenoble in our institute to create the team "Floral regulators: structure, function and evolution". With his team, he studies flower development at the molecular level, focusing on the regulation of the activity of genes that shape the floral bud. Flower development is used as a model system to answer general questions such as the interaction between transcription factors and chromatin remodeling proteins, the modeling of the recognition of specific DNA sequences by transcription factors or the evolution of regulatory networks.