First person – Mami Uemura and Mayumi Higashi

First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Disease Models & Mechanisms (DMM), helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Mami Uemura and Mayumi Higashi are joint first authors on ‘Gallbladder wall abnormality in biliary atresia of mouse Sox17(+/−) neonates and human infants’, published in DMM. Mami is a researcher in the lab of Yoshiakira Kanai at the Department of Veterinary Anatomy, the University of Tokyo, Japan, investigating the pathologic clarification of hepatobiliary diseases such as biliary atresia. Mayumi is a researcher and pediatric surgeon in the lab of Tatsuro Tajiri at the Department of Pediatric Surgery, Kyoto Prefectural University of Medicine, Japan, investigating pediatric liver diseases and the development of therapies.