First person – Youwen Zhang

First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Disease Models & Mechanisms, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Youwen Zhang is first author on ‘ Propensity to endoplasmic reticulum stress in deer mouse fibroblasts predicts skin inflammation and body weight gain’, published in DMM. Youwen is a PhD student in the lab of Hippokratis Kiaris at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA, investigating the underlying pathogenic mechanisms associated with disruption of energy and protein homeostasis in organisms.