Q&As in 2019

Verena Ruprecht is a group Leader in the Cell & Developmental Biology program at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona. She studies organismal development using zebrafish as a system, taking an interdisciplinary approach involving cell and molecular biology, imaging and mathematical tools to obtain information on the scale of molecules, cells, and tissues. We have asked Dr. Ruprecht about her research and thoughts about the future of her field as part our series on early-career researchers.

Toshiro Moroishi is an Associate Professor at the Department of Molecular Enzymology at Kumamoto University, Japan where he has led his own group since December 2017. Research in his lab is focused on the role and regulation of Hippo signalling in development and cancer with a specific interest in the role for Hippo in immunosuppression. He tells us about his research interests, career and lessons learned along the way, as part of our series on early-career researchers.

Dr. Lovorka Stojic is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Cambridge and will start her own research group at the Barts Cancer Institute this fall. Her research focuses on understanding how long noncoding RNAs and RNA-binding proteins regulate key cellular processes and how dysregulation of these processes can contribute to human diseases such as cancer. As part of our series on early-career researchers, we asked Dr. Stojic to tell us about her research and career path. She also shares her challenges from juggling between multiple roles and advice for job applications.

Dr. Kate Miroshnikova is a bioengineer by training and is currently a postdoctoral EMBO/HFSP fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing and at the Helsinki Institute of Life Science. She is interested in understanding biomechanical regulation of stem cell fate decisions in health and disease. Kate’s long term scientific interest is to understand how cells and tissues sense, integrate, and adapt their transcriptomes and proteomes to the highly dynamic mechanical environments without compromising structural and genomic integrity.

Dr. Matt Field is a Senior Research Fellow in Bioinformatics at the Australian Institute of Tropical Health and Medicine at James Cook University, co-director of the Centre for Tropical Bioinformatics and Molecular Biology, and a Chief Investigator for the Centre for Personalised Immunology, an NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence. His research focuses on developing high-throughput bioinformatic analysis pipelines and bringing genomics and personalised medicine into routine clinical practice. In this instalment of our series on early-career researchers, we asked Dr. Field to talk about his research, career trajectory, and the importance of remembering the big picture when working on projects with potential clinical impact.

Dr. Benjamin Bitler began his independent career at University of Colorado in January 2017. In this short Q&A he tells us about his motivation and passion for research, advice he would give to his younger self, and the attributes of cancer cells that he finds most perplexing.

Dr. Natalia Castaño-Rodríguez is a National Health and Medical Research Council Early Career Fellow in the School of Biotechnology and Biomolecular Sciences at the University of New South Wales. Her research focuses on understanding how host immunogenetic factors interact with bacterial infection and gut dysbiosis to regulate tumorigenesis and chronic inflammation in humans, using molecular biology, microbiology, genetics, and bioinformatics. As part of our series on early-career researchers, we asked Dr. Castaño-Rodríguez to talk to us about her research and career path. She also shares the lesson she’s learned from studying the bacteria colonizing our stomachs.

Dr. Alexander Wyatt is a Senior Research Scientist at the Vancouver Prostate Centre and Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. His research uses genomics and bioinformatics to understand lethal prostate and bladder cancer and identify potential new targets for therapy. In this latest instalment of our series highlighting early-career researchers in biology, Dr. Wyatt tells us about research interests and career and about the challenges of the demanding research faculty workload. We’re sure many of our readers will appreciate Dr. Wyatt’s advice on the importance of learning to say “no”.

Dr. Andrea Henle is an Assistant Professor of biology at Carthage College in Wisconsin. Her research focuses on uveal melanoma, using zebrafish as a model system, and spans molecular and cellular mechanisms of cancer progression, immunology, and even space biology. As part of our series on early-career researchers, we asked Dr. Henle to talk to us about her research and her passion for teaching undergraduate students. Dr. Henle also has some advice for young scientists pursuing an academic career, which we think is equally valuable for anyone starting out on their unique career path.