In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with Ugne Debonyte regarding her research journey in academia. Debonyte is pursuing her PhD at the University of Copenhagen, where she is exploring the use of stem cells in the study of schizophrenia. Despite facing several challenges during her academic journey, she persevered and overcame these obstacles. In this interview, Debonyte candidly shares her experience of leaving her initial PhD program after two years due to a lack of support. She also speaks publicly for the first time about this topic.  Additionally, she outlines her study on using stem cells to investigate mental disorders and examines the advantages and disadvantages of utilizing in-vitro models to study schizophrenia.  Paper: Current advancements of modelling schizophrenia using patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9756764/