First person – Isabella Guardamagna

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. Isabella Guardamagna is first author on ‘A functional in vitro cell-free system for studying DNA repair in isolated nuclei’, published in JCS. Isabella conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in Lucia Anna Stivala's lab at the Immunology and General Pathology Unit, University of Pavia, Italy. She is now a postdoc in the lab of Andrea Ottolenghi, part of the Radiation Biophysics and Radiobiology group at the University of Pavia, Italy, investigating how cancer cells that are resistant to chemotherapy and radiotherapy acquire proliferative advantages in relation to DNA repair mechanisms and cell-cycle perturbation.