Dr. Joe Francis of the SUNY Downstate Medical Center as a tenured associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering. Dr. Francis’ research and expertise interfaces very well with the neural engineering and computational expertise currently available in our department. Given his technical expertise with Brain Computer Interface (BCI) hardware and data analysis algorithms, he is very likely to bolster ongoing neural engineering research in BME, as well as neuroscience research in BME and elsewhere on campus, as he already has collaborators in the engineering school outside of BME. Dr. Francis’s work is well funded, with active support from DARPA, The Christopher and Dana Reeve foundation and the NIH ($1.8M), where he has been listed as the lead PI. In addition, he is listed as a PI, or co-PI on several additional grants that are under review at the NSF.