Clyde Francks

Prof. dr. Clyde Francks leads the Imaging Genomics research group at the Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. He is also Professor of Brain Imaging Genomics at the Cognitive Neuroscience Department and Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition & Behaviour at Radboud University Medical Center. His group studies the genetics of language, brain disorders and asymmetry of the brain on its left to right axis. The group is funded by the Max Planck Society with additional grant funding from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

Professor Francks graduated in zoology from the University of Oxford in 1996. He then moved to the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, Oxford, where he obtained his doctorate (Wellcome Trust Prize student, DPhil 2002) and stayed as a postdoctoral researcher until 2005. During these years he investigated the genetics of dyslexia and led a project on the genetics of handedness and schizophrenia. From 2005 he continued as a visiting fellow at Oxford while working as a manager in the pharmaceuticals industry (GlaxoSmithKline, Verona, Italy), during which time he led collaborative academia-industry projects on the genetics of schizophrenia and cigarette smoking. In 2010 he started in his current position at the Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen.