First person – Alessandra da Silva Dantas

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. Alessandra da Silva Dantas is first author on ‘ Crosstalk between the calcineurin and cell wall integrity pathways prevents chitin overexpression in Candida albicans’, published in JCS. Alessandra is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Prof. Neil Gow at the Medical Research Council Centre for Medical Mycology at the University of Exeter, UK, and is interested in the mechanisms controlling cell division and death in human fungal pathogens.