Cell scientist to watch – Dan Dickinson

Dan Dickinson is an Assistant Professor in Molecular Biosciences at the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin), USA. He completed his doctoral studies at Stanford University in California, co-mentored by Prof. Bill Weis and Prof. James Nelson, where he became fascinated with cell polarity in the amoeba Dictyostelium discoideum. He next moved to Prof. Bob Goldstein's lab at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for his postdoctoral research, where he developed a single-cell method to probe protein interactions in Caenorhabditis elegans zygotes. In 2017, he started his own lab at UT Austin. Intrigued by capacity of proteins to generate complex patterns across scales, his group aims to close the gap between biochemistry and cell biology using single-cell methods to investigate cell polarity in diverse contexts. For our Special Issue on Cell and Tissue Polarity, we spoke with Dan over Zoom about his goals as a researcher and educator and his dedication to teaching students the joy of scientific inquiry.