First person – Emily McParland and Noah Gurley

ABSTRACT First Person is a series of interviews with the authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Emily McParland and Noah Gurley are co-authors on ‘ The dual Ras-association domains of Drosophila Canoe have differential roles in linking cell junctions to the cytoskeleton during morphogenesis’, published in JCS. Emily and Noah conducted the research described in this article while research technicians in the lab of Dr Mark Peifer at the Department of Biology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, USA. Emily is now a PhD student in the lab of Dr Thomas Roberts at Brown University, Providence, RI, USA, investigating comparative biomechanics and functional morphology. Noah is currently a rotation PhD student at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA, investigating regulatory networks involved in coordinating collective cell behaviors.