First person – Manuela Santalla

First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Biology Open, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Manuela Santalla is first author on ‘Testing the effect of tobacco cigarettes on heart function of Drosophila melanogaster’, published in BiO. Manuela is a postdoc in the lab of Dr. Paola Ferrero, interested in understanding how the heart works. She studies the physiology of the heart of the fruit fly and how different conditions affect it.