Cell scientist to watch – Kelly Nguyen

ABSTRACT Kelly is a group leader at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB, Cambridge, UK). Kelly received her bachelor's degree with honours in Chemistry from the Australian National University (Australia), followed by a PhD at the LMB (UK), under the supervision of the late Kiyoshi Nagai, where she studied the structural basis of spliceosome assembly. For her postdoctoral studies she moved to the University of California, Berkeley (USA), where she worked with Kathleen Collins and Eva Nogales as a Miller Research Fellow and HHMI Postdoctoral Research Associate, to work on telomerase structural biology. In 2019, Kelly returned to the UK to start her own research group at the LMB to study telomere biology. We spoke to Kelly over Zoom to hear more about her career, her advice on collaborative research and her passion for martial arts.