Vikram Pattanayak is an Assistant in Pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital and an Instructor in Pathology at Harvard Medical School, leading a subgroup of Keith Joung’s laboratory focused on the development of genome editing tools. During his M.D., Ph.D. thesis work with David Liu in the Harvard Chemistry department, he developed assays to define the specificities of designer endonucleases, including homing endonucleases, zinc finger nucleases (ZFNs), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and Cas9. As a member of the Joung lab, he engineered a variant of Cas9 (SpCas9-HF1) with minimal off-target effects. In addition to his research activities, Vikram has also completed a residency in clinical pathology and fellowship in molecular genetic pathology and serves as the medical director of the MGH histocompatibility (HLA) laboratory.