Professor Francis Szele

Associate Professor of Developmental Biology

Francis Szele focuses on discovering molecular mechanisms that regulate brain development in health and disease. In particular, he is a world expert on adult neurogenic zone developmental responses to disease and injury.

He was the first to show that SVZ neurogenesis increases in disease (TBI) during his PhD at the University of Pennsylvania. For his Postdoc at Harvard Medical School he carried out DNA bar-coding in the developing forebrain to determine trajectories of forebrain development (Cepko Lab, Howard Hughes Medical Institute).

Szele’s group developed the use of 2-photon microscopy (2PM) for studying SVZ neuroblast migration (Nam, 2007). He started his group at Northwestern University in 1999 and was recruited to Oxford in 2007.