Principal Investigator
Duke Autism Center of Excellence

Franz served as the center’s associate director from 2022 to 2024, when she became the interim director after Geraldine Dawson, PhD, William Cleland Distinguished Professor, stepped down from the center leadership role. Franz has excelled in this interim position, and the search committee was deeply impressed by her vision and approach to advancing the center’s mission in the coming years.

Franz is a renowned child and adolescent psychiatrist who has led and co-led a number of behavioral and medical autism clinical trials. She has also co-led several studies using artificial intelligence and medical records to predict the likelihood of autism and late talking and to understand developmental trajectories. 

As an associate research professor of global health at Duke and honorary associate professor at the University of Cape Town, Franz has co-led many international research studies on early intervention for autism in low-resource settings, with a focus on Africa.

Franz earned her medical degree in 2002 from Stellenbosch University in South Africa—her home country—and her master’s in public health degree at Emory University in 2005. She completed her psychiatry residency and child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at Duke, as well as Duke’s Global Health Psychiatry Pathway fellowship, in 2014.