First person – Pratibha Bhadauriya and Akanksha Onkar

ABSTRACT First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Biology Open, helping researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Pratibha Bhadauriya and Akanksha Onkar are co-first authors on ‘ Glycogen synthase is required for heat shock-mediated autophagy induction in neuronal cells’, published in BiO. Pratibha conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in Professor S. Ganesh's lab at the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, India. She is currently a project scientist in the same lab, focusing on understanding the molecular pathway behind stress-related disorders, including neurodegeneration and diabetes, by using cellular and mouse model systems. Akanksha is a postdoctoral research fellow in the lab of Dr Adrian Erlebacher at the University of California, USA, working at the intersection of glycoimmunolgy and pregnancy using mouse models and clinical samples, with an aim to improve maternal health.