First person – Giovanna Lucrecia Gallo and Ayelen Valko

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. Giovanna Lucrecia Gallo and Ayelen Valko are co-first authors on ‘ A novel fission yeast platform to model N-glycosylation and the bases of congenital disorders of glycosylation type I’, published in JCS. Giovanna conducted the research described in this article while a PhD student in Cecilia D'Alessio's lab at Fundación Instituto Leloir, Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is now a postdoc in the lab of Nora Lopez at Centro de Virologia Humana y Animal, Buenos Aires, Argentina, investigating the biological mechanisms underlying virus–host cell interactions, intracellular viral strategies to survive host immune responses and the control mechanisms displayed by the host. Ayelen conducted the research described in this article while a postdoc in Cecilia D'Alessio's lab. She is now a postdoc in the lab of Sebastian Schuck at Heidelberg University Biochemistry Center, Germany, investigating the underlying mechanisms of micro-ER-phagy, an autophagic process that is essential for elimination of the ER during ER stress.