Fanni Gergely: Exploring centrosome biology

JCB • VOLUME 215 • NUMBER 3 • 2016 294 Encouraged by her parents to study abroad, Fanni Gergely left Budapest, Hungary, for Peterhouse College at the University of Cambridge, UK, with the intention to study theoretical physics. To her surprise, she developed an interest for experimental sciences during an internship with Simon Maddrell, which was further confi rmed by a short stay in Daniel St. Johnston’s group studying Drosophila oogenesis. Fanni joined Jordan Raff’s lab at the Wellcome/CRC (now Gurdon) Institute, to pursue her PhD. Her project focused on cloning and characterizing the mammalian homologues to D-TACC, then–newly identifi ed microtubule-binding proteins that play a role in mitosis. After being awarded a Junior Research Fellowship by Gonville and Caius College and a Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship by the Royal Society, she joined Colin Taylor’s group in the Department of Pharmacology, University of Cambridge, to learn about membrane biology and signaling in her postdoctoral studies. However, she returned to mitosis when she found a role for the microtubule polymerase ch-Tog in maintaining spindle bipolarity. Through her postdoc, Fanni moved her attention to the interplay between mitosis and genome stability, and, in particular, concentrated on how centrosomes defi ne spindle poles. In 2005, she was awarded a Royal Society University Research Fellowship to work on centrosomes at the University of Cambridge. She became a tenure-track group leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute (CRUK CI) in 2006 and received tenure in 2012. We contacted her to learn more about her exciting research and career.