First person – Sampo Kukkurainen

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. Sampo Kukkurainen is first author on ‘The F1 loop of the talin head domain acts as a gatekeeper in integrin activation and clustering’, published in JCS. Sampo conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in Vesa Hytönen's lab at Tampere University, Faculty of Medicine and Health Technology, Tampere, Finland. He is now a researcher at Tampere University Hospital. His PhD was on the mechanobiology of talin and integrin, analyzing their atomic level interactions using computational structural biology tools.