Dr. Francis is Assistant Professor at UMD, jointly in the Biology Department and the Brain and Behavior Institute. His research combines methods in animal behavior, neurophysiology, and data analysis to advance our understanding of how we listen to sound. Dr. Francis received his Ph.D. from MIT in 2011. His thesis work with Prof. John Guinan, Jr., used otoacoustic emissions to study cochlear physiology. His initial post-doctoral fellowship (2011-2014) was done in the UMD Neural Systems Lab, where he was granted an NIH F32 award to study task-related auditory processing using single-unit electrophysiology in the neocortex. He completed his postdoctoral training (2015-2021) in the UMD Kanold Lab, where he was awarded an NIH R21 to study task-related neural coding using 2-photon imaging in auditory cortex.