First person – Sriikhar Vedurupaka and Bita Jadali

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. Sriikhar Vedurupaka and Bita Jadali are co-first authors on ‘ A protocadherin mediates oral placode morphogenesis in the tunicate Ciona’, published in BiO. Sriikhar is an undergraduate researcher in the lab of Dr Alberto Stolfi at Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, investigating the neurodevelopment of model organisms and their cellular and molecular mechanisms. Bita is a PhD student in the same lab, investigating the mechanisms and signalling of neural death during tunicate metamorphosis.