First person – Varsha N. Tamilkumar

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. Varsha N. Tamilkumar is first author on ‘ Epithelial fusion is mediated by a partial epithelial–mesenchymal transition’, published in BiO. Varsha conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in Professor Raj Ladher's lab at NCBS-TIFR, Bengaluru, India. She is now a postdoc in the lab of Professor Hiroshi Hamada at NCBS-TIFR, Bengaluru, India, investigating early embryonic development, specifically pattern formation and morphogenesis.