Francis is a highly skilled and experienced product design leader, creative technologist, and music producer with a diverse background spanning media, advertising, music tech, and software development. He specializes in building products that leverage AI to inspire and empower creators.Currently serving as the Head of Product Design at Splice, a music creation platform and marketplace, Francis has returned to the music tech industry, where he began his career as a software engineer. He has a strong track record in the field, having developed the first-generation reverb plug-in for Cakewalk and being an early developer at Harmonix Music for "The Axe," a precursor to the Rock Band video game phenomenon. Additionally, Francis was the founding CTO at SonicBids, where he helped develop the Electronic Press Kit (EPK). His innovation and technical mindset have earned him wins at hack competitions, including Boston's Music Hack Day and MIT's Semantic Web Hack Competition in the late 2000s.Before his tenure at Splice, Francis was the Director of Product Design for Ad Innovation at Yahoo/Verizon Media. In this role, he led product design for Native Advertising across Yahoo's properties and managed a portfolio of ad formats for a multi-billion dollar ad-serving platform. His contributions to the field are underscored by his interactive video and ad rendering algorithms patents. Francis holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Connecticut and an MS in Biomedical Engineering from Rutgers University, where his graduate research focused on psychoacoustics, neural networks, digital signal processing, and speech recognition.Passionate about mentoring the next generation of product designers, Francis is a founding industry adviser to Rutgers University Innovation Design Entrepreneurship Academy (IDEA), which provides students with practical product and design thinking training. He has also served as lead and HBCU recruiter for the Yahoo Design Associate Program.In the music world, Francis made his impact as a producer in Boston's socially conscious music scene during the 2000s. He co-founded The Jugganautz and earned the New England Urban Music Awards "Producer of the Year," hosted by Berklee College of Music. His collaborations include notable artists like Iyeoka Okoawo, David Franz, Omega Red, Kishi Bashi, and Clinton Sparks. Francis is currently working on a broad span of electronic music projects.