Chris Fazekas is a Biology PhD student in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at New York University. He earned his B.S. in Biomolecular Science from NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering in 2022. After exploring internships in finance and venture capital, Chris pivoted to the life sciences and conducted undergraduate research on cell cycle genes using CRISPR/Cas9 under the mentorship of Dr. Nikita Grigoryev. Following graduation, he worked as a lab technician at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) in Dr. Alejandro Chavez’s lab, where he co-led the lab’s small molecule drug screening efforts against a library of exogenously expressed viral proteases as part of the MAVDA consortium. While his experimental background is rooted in medical biology, Chris’s primary interest lies in exploring biological information at scale. This focus led him to the Huang Lab, where he plans to study and modify gene regulatory networks with the goal of improving drought resistance in essential crop species.