Contributors

Meet some of the people featured in the September 2017 issue of The Scientist.

Written byCatherine Offord and Jef Akst

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MONTY RAKUSENSkirmantas Kriaucionis had been playing around with microscopes since his school days. But it was during a project with DNA methylation researcher Saulius Klimasauskas at Vilnius University in his native Lithuania that Kriaucionis got a real chance to dive into biological research. “The work was really exciting,” he says. “My interest in it has continued throughout my life.”

After relocating to the University of Edinburgh in 2000, Kriaucionis began a PhD with geneticist Adrian Bird on MeCP2, a protein that binds to methylated DNA. “It was a very exciting period to work on MeCP2,” Kriaucionis recalls—Bird’s lab had just developed a knockout mouse model, and mutations in the MECP2 gene had recently been linked to Rett syndrome in humans. With Bird, Kriaucionis identified a previously overlooked isoform of the protein that accounted for more than 90 percent of MeCP2 in mouse brains.

Kriaucionis earned his PhD in 2004, and, after a one-year postdoc at Edinburgh, moved to neuroscientist Nathaniel Heintz’s lab at Rockefeller University in 2006. There, he identified a new type of DNA methylation, 5-hydroxymethylcytosine (5hmC), occurring at high levels in neurons ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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Jef Akst
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Jef (an unusual nickname for Jennifer) got her master’s degree from Indiana University in April 2009 studying the mating behavior of seahorses. After four years of diving off the Gulf Coast of Tampa and performing behavioral experiments at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga, she left research to pursue a career in science writing. As The Scientist's managing editor, Jef edited features and oversaw the production of the TS Digest and quarterly print magazine. In 2022, her feature on uterus transplantation earned first place in the trade category of the Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism. She is a member of the National Association of Science Writers.
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