First person – Emilie Auxerre-Plantié and Tanja Nielsen

ABSTRACT 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. Emilie Auxerre-Plantié and Tanja Nielsen are co-first authors on ‘Identification of MYOM2 as a candidate gene in hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and Tetralogy of Fallot, and its functional evaluation in the Drosophila heart’, published in DMM. Emilie conducted the research described in this article while a postdoctoral researcher in Prof. Silke Rickert-Sperling's lab at Charité–Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany. She is now a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Dr Lucas Waltzer at the Gred Institute, Clermont-Ferrand, France, investigating (epi)genetics in Drosophila during muscle and heart development. Tanja conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in Prof. Silke Rickert-Sperling's lab. She is now a PhD student in the lab of Prof. Rolf Bodmer at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute, La Jolla, CA, USA, investigating the genetic basis of congenital heart diseases using Drosophila as a genetic heart model.