Francis is a Postdoctoral Research Associate investigating the links between exposure to natural environments and mental health.

He is currently working in collaboration with a number of institutions on an NIHR-funded project investigating links between access to green-blue spaces and individual-level health and wellbeing.

Francis previously worked on the NERC-funded PollerGEN project, exploring links between airborne grass pollen and population-scale respiratory health. This focussed on whether respiratory health responses vary according to grass species, and involved bringing together large public health and environmental datasets.

He completed a PhD in Physical Geography at the University of Plymouth in 2018, research which focused on ‘The ecology and climates of early Middle Pleistocene interglacials in Britain’.

This work studied Middle Pleistocene palaeoenvironments through the analysis of sub-fossil insects, pollen and coprophilous fungal spores, with particular focus on local-scale ecological dynamics and regional climates.