Maria Kuhn, MSc, is a PhD student in Prof Randall Platt’s group at ETH Zurich. As one of the first students to join, she helped to establish the Laboratory for Biological Engineering, and her PhD research combines her two main interests by developing direct in vivo CRISPR screens in the central nervous system. Before joining ETH Zurich, she worked at the Roche Innovation Center Zürich (RICZ), focusing on high-throughput molecular cloning and gene expression techniques. She graduated with high distinction in molecular biotechnology from the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany, in 2015. During her studies, she received a German National Scholarship and was part of the TUM: Young Academy support programme. For her master’s thesis at the Helmholtz Centre in Munich, she studied genetic mutations in murine models for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.