Cell scientist to watch – Andrew Stephens

Andrew Stephens is an Associate Professor in Biology at the University of Massachusetts (UMass) Amherst in the USA. Andrew obtained his bachelor's degree in biology from the University of Missouri-Kansas City before pursuing a PhD at the University North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Kerry Bloom. There, he researched the biophysics of chromatin during mitosis, earning his doctorate in 2013. He then moved to Northwestern University in Illinois to join John Marko's lab as a postdoc to study nuclear structure and mechanics. In 2020, he started his independent lab at UMass Amherst, aiming to understand the mechanical basis of nuclear morphology and how it is dysregulated in disease. For our Special Issue on the Cell Biology of the Nucleus, we spoke to Andrew over Zoom to learn about his path into mechanobiology, his experiences running a lab of mainly undergraduate researchers, and what the shape of a nucleus can tell us about a cell's journey from health to disease.