Kavli ScholarLucía Franchini

Lucía Franchini is a molecular evolutionary biologist at CONICET (National Council of Scientific and Technological Research), based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, whose aim is to unravel the genetic bases underlying the evolution of the human brain.

Franchini received a Ph.D. from Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, in Argentina, in 2002. After postdoctoral training at the University of Georgia and the University of Chicago, she returned to Argentina, where she was appointed as a researcher for CONICET, at INGEBI where she is now a Principal Investigator.

Her work has been pivotal in understanding how noncoding regions of the genome shaped the evolution of the human brain. By identifying and functionally characterizing evolutionary hot spots in our genome, her work provides a mechanical explanation for how human brain evolution occurred through the fine-tuning of gene regulation. Her contributions have been published in high-impact international journals, and she has mentored numerous undergraduate students, PhD candidates, and postdoctoral researchers.

Dr. Franchini received the Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship 2026-2027 that she will spend working at Boston Children´s Hospital and Harvard University, where she is collaborating with Dr. Christopher Walsh and other neurobiologists to gain insight into functional consequences of human-specific changes into neuron development and function using state-of-the-art genetic engineering techniques and transcriptomics. Her work focuses on the “dark matter” of the genome (the 98 percent that doesn’t code for proteins), aiming to map the specific DNA changes that contributed to the emergence of the superb cognitive capacities of our brain and our ability to speak.