First person – Kazuko Okamoto

First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Biology Open, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Kazuko Okamoto is first author on ‘ Pressure-induced changes on the morphology and gene expression in mammalian cells’, published in BiO. Kazuko conducted the research described in this article while a research scientist in Tomonobu M. Watanabe's lab at RIKEN Center for Biosystems Dynamics Research, Kobe, Japan. She is now an assistant professor in the lab of Satoru Okuda at Nano Life Science Institute, Kanazawa University, Japan, investigating intracellular communication and transcription regulation.