Francis Szele

The main goals of my lab are to understand fundamental mechanisms governing stem cell behaviours and progenitor migration in the postnatal and adult neurogenesis. We also seek to understand how these mechanisms are altered in response to disease models and how to exogenously manipulate them to enhance repair. Finally we are studying the human subventricular zone in healthy controls and in neuropsychiatric diseases.

I graduated from the College of William and Mary in the USA with a major in Biology. I then worked for two years in the laboratory of Dennis Murphy at the National Institute of Mental Health (Bethesda, Maryland, 1985-1987) on serotonergic control of endocrine responses. I obtained my PhD (1994) working in the laboratory of Marie-Francoise Chesselet at the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, USA) where I carried out one of the first studies showing increased neurogenesis after brain injury. I subsequently did a postdoctoral fellowship in Connie Cepko’s laboratory (Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA, 1994-1999). There I used a complex library of retroviral vectors to examine lineage relationships and migration patterns in the developing chick forebrain.

I established my laboratory in Chicago at Northwestern University returning to work on the subventricular zone (Assistant Professor, 1999-2007). In collaboration with Phil Hockberger my group developed 2-photon time-lapse imaging to study cell migration in the subventricular zone (please see movie below from Nam et al., 2007). 

I joined Oxford University in 2007 where I am now Associate Professor and co-Head of OxStem Neuro.