Ophir Haim Shalem, PhD, is a researcher specializing in experimental and computational biology. He completed his PhD in systems biology at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the laboratory of Feng Zhang, PhD, he pioneered the development of Cas9:sgRNA pooled libraries for genome-wide knockout screening, a method that helps to identify the function of human genes. Dr. Shalem has also spent two years as a visiting scholar in the laboratory of Andrew Dillin, PhD, at the University of California, Berkeley studying cell's response to unfolded proteins in the endoplasmic reticulum, a part of the cell involved in protein and fat production. He established his own laboratory in September 2016 with the aim of developing novel approaches to studying neurodegenerative diseases and cellular processes that control protein quality. The laboratory uses sophisticated research methods and works with human cells, such as stem cells, to explain the mechanisms of production and clumping of abnormal proteins in neurodegenerative diseases.