First person – Omkara Lakshmi Veeranki

First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Disease Models & Mechanisms, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Omkara Lakshmi Veeranki is first author on ‘ A novel patient-derived orthotopic xenograft model of esophageal adenocarcinoma provides a platform for translational discoveries ’, published in DMM. Omkara Lakshmi is a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr Dipen Maru at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA. The focus of her research is understanding key molecular targets and the alterations in gene expression that contribute to pathogenesis of gastrointestinal cancers, which could be used for developing anticancer therapeutics.