First person – Emily D. McParland and T. Amber Butcher

First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Emily D. McParland and T. Amber Butcher are co-first authors on ‘ The Dilute domain in Canoe is not essential for linking cell junctions to the cytoskeleton but supports morphogenesis robustness’, published in JCS. Emily and Amber conducted the research described in this article while they were postbaccalaureate research assistants in the labs of Dr Mark Peifer (E.D.M. and T.A.B.) and Dr Kevin Slep (T.A.B.) at Chapel Hill Department of Biology, University of North Carolina, USA. Emily is now a PhD student in the lab of Dr Thomas Roberts at Brown University, Providence, USA, where she is broadly interested in functional morphology and muscle biomechanics, and focuses on the function of the collagenous extracellular matrix in muscle force production. Amber is a PhD student in the lab of Dr Eric Greene at Columbia University Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, New York, USA, where she uses biochemical and biophysical techniques to investigate protein function, most recently within the context of homologous recombination.