First person – Venkatram Yellapragada

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. Venkatram Yellapragada is first author on ‘ FGF8–FGFR1 signaling regulates human GnRH neuron differentiation in a time- and dose-dependent manner’, published in DMM. He is a doctoral candidate in the lab of Taneli Raivio at the University of Helsinki, and investigates the modeling of human diseases in vitro in order to identify their underlying pathophysiology.