First person – Viju Vijayan Pillai and Prasanthi Koganti

First Person is a series of interviews with the first authors of a selection of papers published in Biology Open, helping early-career researchers promote themselves alongside their papers. Viju Vijayan Pillai and Prasanthi Koganti are co-first authors on ‘ Efficient induction and sustenance of pluripotent stem cells from bovine somatic cells’, published in BIO. Viju conducted the research described within this article while a PhD student in the lab of Vimal Selvaraj at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, and is now a resident veterinary anatomic pathologist at Purdue University, Indianapolis, IN, USA, investigating reproductive pathology and early embryonic development. Prasanthi is a postdoctoral associate in the lab of Vimal Selvaraj at Cornell University, investigating molecular mechanisms that regulate cellular functions.