People

Principal investigator

Joseph T. (Joe) Francis, Ph.D.
Professor of Biomedical Engineering and of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston

jtfrancis@uh.edu
713-743-0985

Biography

Joseph T. (Joe) Francis is Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Houston and holds a joint appointment in Electrical and Computer Engineering. He received the B.S. degree in biology with honors from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1994 and the Ph.D. in neuroscience from The George Washington University in 2001, where he worked with Steven J. Schiff on nonlinear neural dynamics and on how sensitive neurons are to weak electric fields. After that he trained in computational motor control with Reza Shadmehr at Johns Hopkins University and in brain-machine interfacing with John K. Chapin at SUNY Downstate Medical Center. Downstate kept him on as faculty, and he rose to Associate Professor of Physiology and Pharmacology there.

From 2010 to 2015 he was a co-PI of the DARPA REPAIR program and PI of its SUNY Downstate team. In 2015 he moved to UH, where he was promoted to Professor in 2018. His lab builds brain-machine interfaces meant to restore movement and touch, and studies how reward and motivation shape sensorimotor cortex. "We want people to feel whole whether or not they have their limbs," as he puts it. He has mentored and graduated 14 Ph.D., 6 M.D./Ph.D. and 5 M.S. students, and 8 postdoctoral fellows have trained with him.