Melissa Franch is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Benjamin Hayden at Baylor College of Medicine. She received her undergraduate degrees in biology and science education at North Carolina State University. She earned her doctorate from UTHealth Houston/MD Anderson Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences in the lab of Valentin Dragoi, where she studied the cortical basis of social learning and visually guided decisions in cooperating monkeys. Motivated to understand the neural computations underlying social behavior and communication, Franch now studies how the human brain represents the meanings, or semantics, of the words we hear, and examines how neural coding of semantic context (i.e., how the brain uses the other words in the sentence) might be altered in patients with autism. In the Franch lab, she plans to continue studying the neural processes that support language and social cognition, using frameworks such as predictive coding and social motivation to test how these computations may differ in people with autism.