First person – Abhijit Biswas and Gunjan Singh

First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Abhijit Biswas and Gunjan Singh are co-first authors on ‘ Non-canonically regulated heterochronic expression of Hsp70 drives clonal expansion and invasion in Drosophila epithelial tumours’, published in JCS. Abhijit is a PhD Student in the lab of Prof. S. C. Lakhotia and Dr Devanjan Sinha at Department of Zoology, Banaras Hindu University (BHU), India, investigating the signalling cross talk during cancer development in Drosophila epithelial tumours. Gunjan conducted this work in the same laboratory and is now a Postdoc in the lab of Erica Larschan and Kate O'Connor-Giles at MCB and Neuroscience Department, Brown University, Providence, USA. Her current research uses Drosophila to study how synaptic genes are regulated across development and ageing, with a focus on how neurons achieve precise spatial and temporal control of gene expression and how that regulation evolves over time.