First person – Francesca Mastropasqua and Marika Oksanen

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. Francesca Mastropasqua and Marika Oksanen are co-first authors on ‘ Deficiency of the Heterogeneous Nuclear Ribonucleoprotein U locus leads to delayed hindbrain neurogenesis’, published in BiO. Francesca is a Senior research specialist in the lab of Kristiina Tammimies at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, investigating the molecular effects of genetic mutations. Marika is a PhD student in the same lab investigating RNA-binding proteins and their ability to control gene expression.