Szele, Professor Francis

Francis graduated from the College of William and Mary (USA) with a major in Biology. He worked for two years in the laboratory of Dennis Murphy at the National Institute of Mental Health (Bethesda, Maryland) on serotonergic control of endocrine responses. He obtained his PhD working in the laboratory of Marie-Francoise Chesselet at the University of Pennsylvania, where he carried out one of the first studies showing increased neurogenesis after brain injury. He subsequently did a postdoctoral fellowship in Connie Cepko’s laboratory (Harvard Medical School) where he used a complex library of retroviral vectors to examine lineage relationships and migration patterns in the developing chick forebrain.

Francis established his laboratory in Chicago at Northwestern University returning to work on the subventricular zone. In collaboration with Phil Hockberger, Francis’ group developed 2-photon time-lapse imaging to study cell migration in the subventricular zone. He joined Oxford University in 2007 where he is now Associate Professor. He is a co-founding principal investigator of OxStem Neuro.