Cell scientist to watch - Mads Gyrd-Hansen.

Mads Gyrd-Hansen studied biochemistry at the University of Copenhagen and received his PhD in 2005 under the supervision of Marja Jäättelä at the Danish Cancer Society Research Centre. He then joined the laboratory of Pascal Meier at the Institute of Cancer Research in London to work on the inhibitor of apoptosis (IAP) proteins. Mads returned to Copenhagen in 2008 to the Biotech Research and Innovation Centre (BRIC) in a senior postdoctoral position with Morten Frödin, and subsequently started his own research group with a career-development fellowship from the Danish Research Councils as part of the laboratory of Niels Mailand at the Novo Nordisk Foundation Centre for Protein Research. In 2013, he joined the Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research at the University of Oxford, where he is now an associate professor and holder of a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellowship and a Sapere Aude starting grant from the Danish Research Councils. Mads is interested in the non-degradative functions and regulation of ubiquitylation in pro-inflammatory signalling during innate immune responses.This article is part of a Minifocus on Ubiquitin Regulation and Function. For further reading, please see related articles: 'Mechanisms of regulation and diversification of deubiquitylating enzyme function' by Pawel Leznicki and Yogesh Kulathu (J. Cell Sci.130, 1997-2006). 'Exploitation of the host cell ubiquitin machinery by microbial effector' proteins by Yi-Han Lin and Matthias P. Machner (J. Cell Sci.130, 1985-1996).