New editorial board members

Anne Bertolotti is a Program Leader at the Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. She earned two degrees in biochemistry and plant physiology and a Master’s degree in cell and molecular biology from the Louis Pasteur University of Strasbourg, France. She received her PhD for the discovery of hTAFII68 (now TAF15), working with Lazlo Tora and Pierre Chambon at Institut de Genetique et de Biologie Moleculaire et Cellulaire. Dr. Bertolotti did her postdoctoral research with David Ron at the Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine, New York University Medical Center, New York, discovering components of the mammalian unfolded protein. She started her group as an INSERM scientist at École Normale Supérieure in Paris before moving to Cambridge in 2006. Dr. Bertolotti’s lab focuses on understanding the mechanisms that govern the deposition of misfolding-prone proteins, why they persist in aged cells, and discovering methods for clearing or reducing the impact of these misfolded proteins. Photo courtesy of the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology.

Tatsuya Hirano is a Chief Scientist at RIKEN, Wako, Japan. He received his PhD from Kyoto University and did his postdoctoral work at University of California, San Francisco, where he worked with Tim Mitchison. He started his own laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, in 1995, and relocated it to RIKEN in 2007. His laboratory uses a combination of biochemical and cell biological approaches to understanding the molecular mechanisms of mitotic chromosome assembly, with a major focus on the structure and functions of condensins, the central player of this process. Photo courtesy of Tatsuya Hirano.

Ulrike Kutay is Professor of Biochemistry at ETH Zurich. Her research group investigates the organization, function, and dynamics of the cell nucleus, in particular its restructuring for cell division, the function of the nuclear envelope in cellular organization, as well as the complex pathway of ribosome synthesis. Ulrike studied biochemistry in Berlin, graduated with work on membrane insertion of tail-anchored proteins, supervised by Tom Rapoport in Berlin and Boston, and worked on nucleo-cytoplasmic transport during her postdoctoral training with Dirk Görlich in Heidelberg. Ulrike is a member of EMBO, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Academy of Europe. Photo courtesy of ETH.

Pekka Lappalainen is an academy professor and professor in Quantitative Cell Biology at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Pekka did his PhD work at EMBL-Heidelberg, Germany. This was followed by postdoctoral research with David Drubin at University of California, Berkeley, where he explored actin dynamics in budding yeast. In 1998, he moved to the University of Helsinki to start his own laboratory, which focuses on understanding the general principles that control the architecture and dynamics of the actin cytoskeleton in different cellular processes. The laboratory is particularly interested in the interplay between the actin cytoskeleton and plasma membrane in cell migration and morphogenesis, as well as in uncovering the mechanisms by which contractile, mechanosensitive actomyosin bundles are assembled in different cell types. Photo courtesy of the University of Helsinki.

Gaia Pigino is the Associate Head of the Centre for Structural Biology of the Human Technopole in Milan, Italy. Her team operates right at the interface between structural and molecular cell biology, using the latest methodologies from both fields to study the molecular machines required for the assembly and function of motile and primary cilia. She received her PhD in Evolutionary Biology from the University of Siena, Italy in 2007 for her studies of bio-indicators for contaminated soils. EM quickly became central in her research. After a short postdoc in the EM Lab of the University of Siena (2007–2009), she moved to Switzerland, where she worked at ETH Zurich and the Paul Scherer Institute to investigate the structure of ciliary components using cryo-EM (2009–2012). In 2012, Dr. Pigino became a research group leader at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany, from where she recently moved to the Human Technopole in Milan. Photo courtesy of Human Technopole.

Jenny Stow studies protein trafficking in secretory and endocytic pathways, focusing on Rab GTPases and using cell imaging and microscopy as key technologies. Jenny completed her PhD in Melbourne, Australia, moving to Yale School of Medicine as a postdoctoral fellow with Marilyn Farquhar, then to Massachusetts General Hospital as an Assistant Professor. As a Wellcome Trust Fellow, she relocated her lab back to Australia in the mid-90s. Jenny has been at the University of Queensland since that time as a Group Leader in the multidisciplinary life sciences hub at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience, also serving two terms as its Director of Research. The laboratory is currently working on pathways and regulators of inflammatory cytokines and innate immune responses in macrophages and cancer cells. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Stow.

Dr. Lloyd Trotman received his PhD in cell biology of adenovirus entry from the University of Zurich with Dr. Urs Greber and did his postdoctoral studies on cancer genetics using genetically engineered mice at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center with Dr. Pier Paolo Pandolfi. He has been a faculty at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, since 2007. His team has developed somatic gene transfer to model the native process of lethal metastatic prostate cancer in genetically engineered mice. A major focus of his work is on compartmentalized signaling with a special focus on the PTEN tumor suppressor, its control by cellular processes such as endocytosis and nuclear transport, and thus he explores their role as drivers of multiple cancer types and inherited disease syndromes. Photo courtesy of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Hongyuan Yang is a professor at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, Australia. He received a Bachelor of Medicine degree from Peking University Health Science Center (Beijing) in 1993 and a PhD from Columbia University (New York) in 1998. From 1999 to 2006, he was a faculty member at the Department of Biochemistry, National University of Singapore. He joined UNSW in 2007. His laboratory studies the glycerol-3-phosphate pathway for the synthesis phospholipids and triacylglycerols, the biogenesis and growth of lipid droplets, as well as how lipids such as phosphatidylserine and cholesterol are sorted and transported within eukaryotic cells. Specifically, his group investigates the cellular and physiological functions of seipin and oxysterol binding proteins. Photo courtesy of the Faculty of Science, UNSW.