First person – Ayyappa Raja Desingu Rajan

ABSTRACT 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. Ayyappa Raja Desingu Rajan is first author on ‘ Generation of a zebrafish neurofibromatosis model via inducible knockout of nf2a/b’, published in DMM. Ayyappa Raja is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Marianne Bronner at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA. Using the neural crest as a model, Ayyappa Raja investigates lineage decisions that contribute to specific tissue types, such as the meninges, and how developmental gene programs can go array in cancers such as meningiomas and neurofibromatosis.