First person – Roger Smith and Igor Odintsov

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. Roger Smith and Igor Odintsov are co-first authors on ‘ Novel patient-derived models of desmoplastic small round cell tumor confirm a targetable dependency on ERBB signaling’, published in DMM. Roger completed the research described in this article while a research technician in the lab of Marc Ladanyi at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY, USA. He is now an MD/PhD student in the lab of Marc Mendillo at Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA, investigating stress response pathways in cancer. Igor completed the research described in this article while a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Marc Ladanyi at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. He is now a resident anatomic pathologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.