Our People
Noel Buckley
FounderNoel Buckley
Founder
Professor Noel Buckley studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge and did his PhD in neurobiology with Geoff Burnstock at UCL. He carried out a post-doc with Mike Brownstein at the National Institute of Health (NIH) cloning G-protein coupled receptors before returning to Mill Hill to set up a lab looking at transcriptional control, a focus that continued as a Wellcome Trust Senior Fellow at UCL and then as Head of Neuroscience at the University of Leeds. Noel moved back to London as Head of Neuroscience at King’s College London, where he continued to explore transcriptional and epigenetic control of neurodevelopment and neurodegeneration. In the spring of 2015, Noel moved to Oxford as Professor of Neurobiology at the Department of Psychiatry, where his research focuses on using human pluripotent stem cells as models to discover gene regulatory networks that control neurodevelopment and neurodegeneration. Noel has served on numerous Wellcome Trust committees and is currently Chair of the Wellcome Trust India Alliance Senior Fellowship Committee and member of the Open Research Advisory Group as well as Executive Editor of Stem Cells. Noel is a principal investigator of OxStem Neuro.
Francis Szele
FounderFrancis Szele
Founder
Professor Francis Szele graduated from the College of William and Mary (USA) with a major in Biology. He worked for two years in the laboratory of Dennis Murphy at the National Institute of Mental Health (Bethesda, Maryland) on serotonergic control of endocrine responses. Francis obtained his PhD working in the laboratory of Marie-Francoise Chesselet at the University of Pennsylvania where he carried out one of the first studies showing increased neurogenesis after brain injury. He subsequently did a postdoctoral fellowship in Connie Cepko’s laboratory (Harvard Medical School) where he used a complex library of retroviral vectors to examine lineage relationships and migration patterns in the developing chick forebrain.
Francis established his laboratory in Chicago at Northwestern University returning to work on the subventricular zone. In collaboration with Phil Hockberger, Francis’ group developed 2-photon time-lapse imaging to study cell migration in the subventricular zone. Francis joined Oxford University in 2007 where he is now Associate Professor. The main goals of Francis’ research are to understand the fundamental mechanisms governing stem cell behaviours and progenitor migration in the postnatal and adult neurogenesis. Francis is a co-founding principal investigator of OxStem Neuro.