Masha Cherepkova is a PhD student in Prof Randall Platt’s group at the Department of Biosystems Science and Engineering (D-BSSE) at ETH Zurich. She obtained her BSc and MSc degrees from the Saint Petersburg State University in Russia with a focus on stem cells and developmental biology. She then worked as a research assistant in the Biomedicum Stem Cell Center at the University of Helsinki, where she became interested in developing new research tools using CRISPR-Cas systems. This interest brought her to the Platt group, where she works on improving the efficiency of Record-seq technology in order to develop next-generation living microbial diagnostics.