Dr. Dehua Zhao received his PhD in Microbiology in 2004. After his biochemistry postdoc training at UC Berkeley, he worked in the frontiers of synthetic biology and genome editing to develop versatile tools and to engineer cells for pharmaceutical and industrial applications. He worked on refactoring large gene clusters and genetic circuits at UCSF and synthetic cluster optimization at MIT in the Chris Voigt lab. He joined Stanley Qi lab at Stanford in 2014 where he led the genome-wide CRISPR-ko, CRISPRi and CRISPRa screening effort in primary T cells and cancer cell lines, discovered gene targets to improve CAR-T manufacturing and developed cell therapy using CRISPR/Cas9-edited bone marrow MSC and dendritic cells. He then joined the gene therapy company, NGGT Inc, where he developed three pipelines respectively targeting ophthalmic genetic disease, neuron degeneration disease and metabolic disorder. Dehua is a GSK investigator at LGR in San Francisco and is currently focusing on CRISPR gene editing tools, CRISPR screening for drug targets and functional genomics.