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. Some examples of research papers from the group:

Mapping cortical brain asymmetry in 17,141 healthy individuals worldwide via the ENIGMA Consortium. Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences 2018.

Altered structural brain asymmetry in autism spectrum disorder in a study of 54 datasets. Nature Communications 2019.

The genetic architecture of structural left–right asymmetry of the human brain. Nature Human Behaviour 2021.

Handedness and its genetic influences are associated with structural asymmetries of the cerebral cortex in 31,864 individuals. Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences 2021.

Exome-wide analysis implicates rare protein-altering variants in human handedness. Nature Communications 2024.

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.