First person – Rebeka Popovic and Yizhou Yu

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. Rebeka Popovic and Yizhou Yu are co-first authors on ‘ Upregulation of Tribbles decreases body weight and increases sleep duration’, published in DMM. Rebeka conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in Dr Luis Miguel Martins’ lab at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. Her PhD investigated mechanisms of neurodegeneration, with a focus on endoplasmic reticulum stress and mitochondrial dysfunction, as well as inter-organ communication in disease. She is now a postdoc in the lab of Prof. Fiona Ducotterd at the Drug Discovery Institute at University College London, London, UK, exploring new therapeutic targets for the treatment of neurodegenerative diseases. Yizhou is a PhD student in the lab of Dr Luis Miguel Martins at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK. His research involves combining computational biology and wet-lab techniques to understand the genetic and environmental causes of age-related diseases.