Francesca Puigpelat holds a doctorate in Legal Philosophy, specializing in legal philosophy, and her career has been divided between teaching and research. From 1991 to 2014 she was a professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, where she was Dean of the Law Faculty from 2002 to 2008.

She works with a number of institutions and bodies in the field of bioethics. She is a member of the Consultative Committee on Bioethics of Catalonia, and is currently a member of both the Bioethics, Law and Society Group and the Bioethics Observatory at the University of Barcelona, and is also a member of the Antígona group at UAB.