Interview with Philippe Ory of the EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne) Career Centre. Interviewed by Debora Keller

EPFL's Career Centre was created in 2007 with the mission to be a bridge between EPFL's young graduates and industry, in order to facilitate the transition to active scientific life. Through courses, workshops and personalised advice, they help graduates to set up their application documents (CV, motivation letter), prepare for job interviews and manage their careers. The Centre also offers its services to companies by organising on-campus recruitment days, actively searching for fitting profiles or posting or mailing job adverts to the EPFL graduate community. The Career Centre's goal is to be the platform for the EPFL graduates to build their careers.     

A conversation with Fernando Nottebohm, PhD. Interviewed by Michael Eisenstein

During the last 30 years, a number of revolutionary discoveries in the field of neuroscience have come from what was, at first, an unexpected direction: songbird research. Investigations into seasonal and sex-specific differences in birdsong development have led to important revelations about the impact of sex hormones on brain development and the hormonally controlled plasticity of brain structure, as well as the particularly surprising discovery that neurogenesis continues to occur in the adult brain (see Harding, p. 28). The work of Fernando Nottebohm is widely recognized as having played a key role in bringing these findings to light and thus forcing a general re-examination of established principles of neuroscience.Fernando Nottebohm is Dorothea L. Leonhardt Distinguished Professor at The Rockefeller University, and Director of The Rockefeller Field Research Center for Ethology and Ecology, a 1,200-acre facility located in Millbrook, NY, that provides researchers the opportunity to study behavior and brain function under natural conditions. Nottebohm's pioneering work on the neural control of birdsong has led to major discoveries with large impacts in the fields of animal behavior and neuroscience, and has made him one of the founders of neuroethology, the study of how the nervous system controls animal behavior.Nottebohm is a Member of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. We had a chance to sit down with him to discuss his distinguished career working with laboratory birds.     

An interview with Angela Nieto. Interviewed by Eva Amsen

Angela Nieto is Full Professor at the Instituto de Neurociencias (CSIC-UMH) in Alicante, Spain, and Head of the institute's Developmental Neurobiology Unit. She is also the current president of the Spanish Society for Developmental Biology (Sociedad Espa?ola de Biología del Desarollo, SEBD). We interviewed her to talk about the plans of the SEBD for the coming years.     

Interview with Dr. Mark Cockett: current trends in screening for antiviral therapeutics. Interviewed by Nina N. Brahme and Devin J. Noblin

Dr. Mark Cockett is Vice President of Infectious Diseases and Applied Genomics at Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS). In this interview, we ask Dr. Cockett about considerations that major pharmaceutical companies such as BMS make when screening for and developing antiviral small molecule therapeutics. We discuss the rationale behind an unbiased screening approach that led to recent published work identifying a hepatitis C-specific NS5A inhibitor. We conclude by asking about the emerging role of academia in antiviral drug discovery and future directions of pathogen drug discovery in general.