First person – Melanie Ridgway

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. Melanie Ridgway is first author on ‘ Analysis of sex-specific lipid metabolism in Plasmodium falciparum points to importance of sphingomyelin for gametocytogenesis’, published in JCS. Melanie conducted the research described in this article while a PhD candidate in Alexander Maier's lab at Biomedical Science and Biochemistry, Research School of Biology, Australian National University, Australia. She is now a postdoc in the lab of David Horn at Wellcome Centre for Anti-Infectives Research, Biological Chemistry and Drug Discovery, University of Dundee, Dundee, UK, investigating the cell biology of unicellular parasites.