Olena Kuksenko (Graduate Student) is a PhD student at Columbia University in the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior. She joined Dr. Hemali Phatnani’s lab in the summer of 2021. She is interested in dissecting out changes in the cellular and genetic pathways that precede pathological manifestation in FUS ALS. Olena earned a Sc.B. degree in Neuroscience from Brown University in 2017. Her honors thesis work in Dr. Diane Lipscombe’s lab focused on characterizing the kinetic properties of voltage-gated calcium channels and their role in Timothy Syndrome. Following graduation, she joined Dr. Aviv Regev’s lab at the Broad Institute, where she worked as a research associate for three years. At the Broad, Olena developed a combinatorial CRISPR-Cas9 screening platform called Shuffle-seq, which enables the simultaneous profiling of multiple combinations of perturbations on various phenotypes, such as drug resistance. In addition, she was responsible for increasing the throughput of different CRISPR screening platforms used in the lab and optimizing single cell RNA-sequencing library construction workflows.