Browse our interviews

Brian Bradshaw studies regeneration in marine animals called cnidarians at the National University of Ireland Galway (NUI Galway). Thanks to his parents and older brother, he developed a love of nature and the outdoors at a young age, which steered him towards a career in science.

Jessica Hughes is a lecturer in medical sciences at the University of Wollongong, Australia. Her research focuses on the role of lipids in health and disease. She currently lives with her husband Lucas and their three dogs in Wollongong, where she enjoys walking the dogs on the local off-leash beach every morning.

Meredith Schuman was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, and is currently leading a junior research group at the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), where she investigates the ecological roles of genes in populations of the wild tobacco plant Nicotiana attenuata. She hopes to find a tenure-track position in molecular chemical ecology when funding for her current position ends in 2017. Her hobbies include reading, writing, running, hiking, bodyweight training and travel, and she loves teaching.

Yunsheng Cheng grew up in a village in Anhui Province in China and received his bachelor's degree from Anhui Normal University. He is currently a graduate student at the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, where he studies how neurons transmit signals to other cells. He enjoys listening to country music, and after he graduates he would like to pursue postdoctoral training abroad.

Donna MacDuff moved from the UK to the US in 2003 to do a PhD at the University of Minnesota. She is currently an Instructor at Washington University School of Medicine in St Louis, where she studies how inflammation is controlled during different types of infection. Outside of the lab, she competes in badminton tournaments all over the Midwest.

Fanny Cazettes grew up in the south of France and majored in biomedical engineering at the Institut Superieur des BioSciences (ISBS) in Paris. She is currently a PhD student at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, where she investigates neural activity in owls using physiological, behavioural and computational modelling techniques. She will be applying for a postdoctoral position within the next few months.

Originally from the Netherlands, Peter Hohenstein has been in Edinburgh since 2001 and now has his own group in The Roslin Institute, studying the link between normal kidney development and kidney disease. He is married and has a 4 year old daughter (and three cats), and he enjoys music, ‘mainly old stuff with lots of guitars’.

Elena Oancea is a tenure-track assistant professor with her own group at Brown University, where she explores the biology of skin pigmentation and the skin’s responses to light. When she is not a scientist, she is a mother but, as her children tell her, more often than not she is both.

Keren Yizhak majored in computational biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is currently a PhD student at the School of Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University, where she uses computational techniques to study biological phenomena, focusing on the metabolic changes that occur in cells during cancer and ageing. She will move to the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT in March 2015 to begin her first postdoctoral position. Her main interest outside of science is ballet dancing, which she finds a source of inspiration and discipline.

Maurijn van der Zee is a tenure-track assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His primary interest is to understand the genetic and developmental mechanisms that underlie evolutionary change in animals, but recently he has been exploring a new field: innate immunity in insects. Six months ago he became a father for the first time ‘to a beautiful daughter’. His first PhD student also graduated very recently: he says that this also felt a bit like becoming a father. Maurijn also enjoys writing popular science articles for the Dutch press and giving public lectures.