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David M. Francis, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Dept. Horticulture & Crop Science
francis.77@osu.edu
David Francis's personal webpage

David Francis was educated at Pomona College, where he received his bachelor’s degree in Biology, and the University of California, Davis, where he received his Ph.D in Genetics. He has been in the Department of Horticulture and Crop Science at the Ohio State University since 1995. Dr. Francis’s research program aims to understand the processes involved in plant disease resistance and fruit quality, while contributing to the applied goal of developing tomato varieties adapted to a humid environment.  His research program actively pursues novel and more efficient approaches for variety improvement, such as genome sequence data, data-mining, and information sciences.  He emphasizes in developing techniques for genetic mapping in breeding populations, characterizing the genetic determinants of nutritional quality in tomato fruit, understanding mechanisms of plant resistance to disease, and describing the effect of domestication on the evolutionary relationship within cultivated and wild germplasm.