First person – Mariana Castro Dias

Abstract

First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Journal of Cell Science, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Mariana Castro Dias is first author on 'Brain endothelial tricellular junctions as novel sites for T cell diapedesis across the blood-brain barrier', published in JCS. Mariana conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in Britta Engelhardt's lab at the Theodor Kocher Institute, University of Bern, Switzerland. She is now an Associate Scientific Communications Manager working for Roche Diagnostics International. She is utterly fascinated by the brain, particularly the molecular mechanisms underlying the pathology of neurodegenerative disorders.