Cell scientist to watch - Dana Branzei.

Originally from Iaşi, Romania, Dana received her bachelor's degree in pharmaceutical sciences and a master's degree in molecular and cellular biology from Tohoku University in Sendai, Japan. For her PhD, she joined the lab of Takemi Enomoto to work on DNA replication and recombination in yeast. After a short postdoc with Kunihiro Ohta at the RIKEN laboratory in Wako, Dana took a position as a staff scientist with Marco Foiani at the Institute of Molecular Oncology Foundation (IFOM) in Milan, Italy. There, she became a junior group leader in 2008 and tenured principal investigator in 2013. Dana was elected a member of EMBO in 2016 and has been the recipient of both a European Research Council (ERC) starting grant and an ERC consolidator grant. Her lab is interested in the mechanistic interplay of DNA damage response and regulatory pathways of chromosome structure during replication.