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Keren Yizhak majored in computational biology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is currently a PhD student at the School of Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University, where she uses computational techniques to study biological phenomena, focusing on the metabolic changes that occur in cells during cancer and ageing. She will move to the Broad Institute at Harvard and MIT in March 2015 to begin her first postdoctoral position. Her main interest outside of science is ballet dancing, which she finds a source of inspiration and discipline.

Maurijn van der Zee is a tenure-track assistant professor at Leiden University in the Netherlands. His primary interest is to understand the genetic and developmental mechanisms that underlie evolutionary change in animals, but recently he has been exploring a new field: innate immunity in insects. Six months ago he became a father for the first time ‘to a beautiful daughter’. His first PhD student also graduated very recently: he says that this also felt a bit like becoming a father. Maurijn also enjoys writing popular science articles for the Dutch press and giving public lectures.

David Dowdy is an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he researches tuberculosis.

Katja Kornysheva is a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London and the Department of Neuroscience, University Erasmus Medical Centre.

Ana Domingos of the Gulbenkian Science Institute in Portugal has forged a career learning why we like certain types of food. By looking at the reward system of the mouse brain, she has revealed pathways that explain why animals prefer sugar, and perhaps why it may factor so strongly in the Western diet.

Jessica Metcalf of the University of Colorado is rapidly becoming an expert regarding the science of death. "I've been into dead things for a while," she told eLife. "They hold a lot of information."