First person – Akanksha Onkar

First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Disease Models & Mechanisms, helping researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Akanksha Onkar is first author on ‘ Increase in brain glycogen levels ameliorates Huntington's disease phenotype and rescues neurodegeneration in Drosophila’, published in DMM. Akanksha conducted the research described in this article while a Ph.D. scholar in Dr S. Ganesh's lab at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Kanpur, India. She is now a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Dr Adrian Erlebacher at University of California San Francisco, investigating the moonlighting roles of carbohydrates in normal physiology and disease states.