Browse School of Medicine | Stanford Profiles

BioFrancisco earned his undergraduate degree in Human Developmental and Regenerative Biology from Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude. He subsequently completed his MD/PhD at Stanford University School of Medicine. During his doctoral training under the mentorship of Dr. Sean Wu, Francisco published one of the first comprehensive maps of human cardiac cell development using pluripotent stem cell-based models. His research contributed to the development of machine learning tools and genetic tracing systems that identified and characterized human left ventricular cardiomyocytes in vitro, enabling the modeling of left ventricular development in hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Francisco has authored multiple first-author publications and has been awarded funding from both internal sources and the NIH (F30, T32). He has received numerous accolades for his work, including the prestigious Harold Weintraub Award, and has presented his research at various national conferences. As part of the accelerated research pathway at Stanford, Francisco is focused on the genetic and epigenetic mechanisms underlying heart failure and heart development in congenital heart disease, with the ultimate goal of developing novel therapeutics for pediatric patients.