First person – Alessandra da Silva Dantas

ABSTRACT First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Alessandra da Silva Dantas is first author on ‘ Crosstalk between the calcineurin and cell wall integrity pathways prevents chitin overexpression in Candida albicans’, published in JCS. Alessandra is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Prof. Neil Gow at the Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Mycology at the University of Exeter, UK, and is interested in the mechanisms controlling cell division and death in human fungal pathogens.

Editorial Introduction

The Editors are proud to present the first issue of the fifth volume of the JIOWS. This issue represents a number of innovations in IOW studies and for our journal.Firstly, we present a special feature on port-towns in the IOW, organized and guest edited by Vidhya Raveendranathan and Duane Corpis. This special feature stems from an interdisciplinary conference held at NYU Shanghai in 2019 and adds perspectives focusing on labour and infrastructure to our understanding of the IOW’s port-towns, past and present. Raveendranathan has written a historiographical primer and has introduced the four articles contained within the feature in the Guest Editors’ Introduction. We are also thrilled to announce that she has agreed to join the permanent editorial team as a Managing Editor following the publication of this issue. We look forward to continuing our work together moving forwards.Secondly, we present two articles dealing with separate issues in IOW studies. Nancy Wright engages the work of Lindsey Collen, a Mauritian novelist, to challenge the thematic paradigms of ‘centre’ and ‘margins’ in the literature of the IOW. She argues that, through using the English language and folklore in her writing, Collen brings the margins to the centre, thereby obliviating an assumed analytical dichotomy. Collen’s work transforms this and other dichotomies by narrating the human condition across gender, class, and nation. Meanwhile, Heena Mistry re-visits the repatriation debate in India following the abolition of indenture in 1917. By drawing on the work of an ‘ocean-crossing activist’ and a journalist with significant links to South Africa, she sheds new light on Indian diasporic perspectives of late colonial India and the IOW. Here, the IOW perspective challenges better-known histories of Indian Nationalism and anticolonialism that focus largely on developments occurring within India itself.Finally, we are proud to launch the Book Reviews section of the JIOWS with Zozan Pehlivan as Book Reviews’ Editor. As Pehlivan is a former postdoctoral fellow at the IOWC, we are especially excited to renew our formal collaboration with her in this new role. In this issue, we present reviews of two exciting publications in IOW studies: Wilson Chacko Jacob’s For God or Empire and Laleh Khalili’s Sinews of War and Trade. We hope to build on and expand our book reviews section moving forwards, making the JIOWS the prime location in which scholarship pertaining to the IOW is discussed and analysed.

First person – Ambuja Navalkar

ABSTRACT First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Ambuja Navalkar is first author on ‘Direct evidence of cellular transformation by prion-like p53 amyloid infection’, published in JCS. Ambuja conducted the research described in this article while a research fellow in Professor Samir K. Maji's lab at the Department of Biosciences and Bioengineering, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India. She is now an Institute Postdoctoral Fellow in the Maji lab, investigating protein aggregation linked with cancer and neurodegeneration.

“UHAND”—A National Cancer Institute Funded Partnership to Advance Cancer Health Equity through Scholar Training

Black and Hispanic adults are disproportionately affected by cancer incidence and mortality, and experience disparities in cancer relative to their White counterparts in the US. These groups, including women, are underrepresented among scientists in the fields of cancer, cancer disparities, and cancer care. The “UHAND” Program is a partnership between institutions (University of Houston and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center) aiming to build the capacity of underrepresented and racial/ethnic minority student “scholars” to conduct research on eliminating cancer inequities by reducing social and physical risk factors among at-risk groups. Here, we examine the outcomes of the UHAND Program’s first scholar cohort (n = 1 postdoctoral fellow, n = 3 doctoral scholars, n = 6 undergraduate scholars). Data collection included baseline, mid-program, and exit surveys; program records; and monthly scholar achievement queries. From baseline to exit, scholars significantly increased their research self-efficacy (p = 0.0293). Scholars largely met goals for academic products, achieving a combined total of 65 peer-reviewed presentations and nine empirical publications. Eight scholars completed the 2-year program; one undergraduate scholar received her degree early and the postdoctoral fellow accepted a tenure-track position at another university following one year of training. Scholars highly rated UHAND’s programming and their mentors’ competencies in training scholars for research careers. Additionally, we discuss lessons learned that may inform future training programs.

First person – Zofia Ostrowska-Podhorodecka

ABSTRACTFirst Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Zofia Ostrowska-Podhorodecka is first author on ‘Vimentin tunes cell migration on collagen by controlling β1 integrin activation and clustering’, published in JCS. Zofia is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Christopher A. McCulloch, University of Toronto, Canada, where her research focuses on the mechanisms of vimentin-dependent regulation of cell adhesion and cell extension formation.

Dr Oris Sanjur

Dr. Sanjur’s relationship with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute spans three decades. In 1989, she was a research assistant for two years working on her undergraduate thesis project. After earning a B.S. in Biology from the University of Panama, she completed a PhD in Cell and Developmental Biology at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. She returned to STRI as a postdoctoral fellow in 1998, studying the relationships between wild and domesticated crops such as squash and pumpkin. She then spent ten years as manager and researcher of the Molecular Evolution laboratory, after which she took on her most recent role as Associate Director for Science Administration at STRI. In this position, she became responsible for maintaining high standards of scientific operational support for the Institute’s research programs throughout a decade.

First person – Brittany Seman

ABSTRACT First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Brittany Seman is first author on ‘Neonatal low-density granulocytes internalize and kill bacteria but suppress monocyte function using extracellular DNA’, published in JCS. Brittany is a postdoctoral fellow in microbiology in the lab of Dr Cory M. Robinson at West Virginia School of Medicine, Morgantown, WV, investigating host–pathogen interactions in the context of infectious diseases.