First person – Sepideh Fallah

ABSTRACT First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Biology Open, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Sepideh Fallah is first author on ‘ Src family kinases inhibit differentiation of intestinal epithelial cells through the Hippo effector YAP1’, published in BiO. Sepideh is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Prof. Jean-François Beaulieu at Université de Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada, investigating how SFKs negatively regulate the differentiation of absorptive and goblet cells through upregulating of YAP1 activity.

Career talk: advanced virology specialist nurse and postdoctoral researcher

In this interview, part of a series about the career pathways of experienced gastrointestinal specialists, Sara Santos speaks with Kathryn Jack

First person – Lucie Wolf

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. Lucie Wolf is first author on ‘ EVI/WLS function is regulated by ubiquitylation and linked to ER-associated degradation by ERLIN2’, published in JCS. Lucie works in the lab of Michael Boutros at German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ), Heidelberg, Germany, investigating the many regulatory layers of cellular communication. She is now a postdoctoral researcher, but was a PhD student when the manuscript was submitted.

The people behind the papers: Toby Andrews and Elia Benito-Gutierrez

A fundamental question of developmental biology is how the coordinated action of various cells gives rise to distinct tissue morphologies that are reproducible across members of the same species. A new paper in Development now addresses this question by performing single-cell morphometrics to study notochord formation in amphioxus. To hear more about the story, we chatted to first author and postdoctoral researcher Toby Andrews, and his PhD supervisor Elia Benito-Gutiérrez, Group Leader in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cambridge.

Cluster Preface: Perspectives on Organoheteroatom and Organometallic Chemistry

Xuefeng Jiang is a professor at East China Normal University. He received his B.S. degree in 2003 from Northwest University (China). He then joined Professor Shengming Ma’s research group at the Shanghai Institute of Organic Chemistry (SIOC), Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he received his Ph.D. degree in 2008. From 2008 to 2011, Xuefeng worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the total synthesis of natural products in the research group of Professor K. C. Nicolaou at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI). His independent research interests have focused on green organosulfur chemistry and methodology-­oriented total synthesis.

Task-based support in search engines

Darío Garigliotti is a postdoctoral researcher at Aalborg University, Denmark, where he works in collaboration with Prof. Katja Hose and Assoc. Prof. Johannes Bjerva, in the areas of information extraction, information retrieval and natural language processing. He completed his doctoral degree in Computer Science at University of Stavanger, Norway, under the supervision of Prof. Krisztian Balog. The website at https://dariogarigliotti.github.io/ contains more information about Garigliotti's work. The research conducted by Garigliotti focused on utilizing and extending methods and techniques from semantic search within an information access paradigm that aims to support users in achieving their tasks. More specifically, to enhance search engines with functionalities for recognizing the underlying tasks in searches and providing support for task completion. The work presented in this thesis is organized in three grand themes: entity type information for entity retrieval, entity-oriented search intents, and task-based search. Alongside the theoretical and empirical contributions, a number of resource contributions were developed, including several corpora and test collections, and a knowledge base of entity-oriented search intents.

First person – Manh Tin Ho and Jiongming Lu

ABSTRACT First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Disease Models & Mechanisms, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Manh Tin Ho and Jiongming Lu are co-first authors on ‘A translation-independent activity of PheRS activates growth and proliferation in Drosophila’, published in DMM. Manh Tin conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in the lab of Beat Suter at the University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland, and is now a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Daniel Fuster at the University of Bern, investigating kidney disease and sodium/proton exchange membrane proteins. Jiongming conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in the lab of Beat Suter at the University of Bern, and is now a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Linda Partridge at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing, Köln, Germany, investigating molecular mechanisms and new strategies of healthy ageing.

First person – Georgios Efthymiou

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. Georgios Efthymiou is first author on ‘Fibronectin Extra Domains tune cellular responses and confer topographically distinct features to fibril networks’, published in JCS. Georgios conducted the research described in this article while a Labex SignaLife PhD Student in Ellen Van Obberghen-Schilling's lab at Université Côte d'Azur, France. He is now a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Sophie Vasseur at the Centre de Recherche en Cancérologie de Marseille, Marseille, France, investigating crosstalk between composition and mechanical properties of the ECM and cellular metabolism in cancer.

An interview with Cagney Coomer

Dr Cagney Coomer received her PhD with Ann Morris at the University of Kentucky, where she studied zebrafish retinal development and regeneration, and is currently a postdoctoral researcher in Marnie Halpern's lab in the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College. In 2020, she was awarded the Society of Developmental Biology's inaugural Trainee Science Communication Award for her work with NERD SQUAD Inc, the non-profit STEM outreach organization she founded that is dedicated to inspiring the next great minds by bringing science to life. Over a virtual chat, we discussed her experiences in the lab, the classroom and the community centre, and why she thinks outreach and role models are vital to science.

The people behind the papers – Brandon Carpenter and David Katz

ABSTRACTA dynamic pattern of histone methylation and demethylation controls gene expression during development, with some processes such as formation of the zygote involving large-scale reprogramming of methylation states. A new paper in Development investigates how inherited histone methylation regulates developmental timing and the germline/soma distinction in Caenorhabditis elegans. To hear more about the story we caught up with first author and postdoctoral researcher Brandon Carpenter, and his supervisor David Katz, Associate Professor in the Department of Cell Biology at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia.