Forest Ray is a graduate student in the laboratory of Andrea Califano. He completed undergraduate training in biophysics at Hunter College. In the laboratory of Benjamin Ortiz he helped to develop therapeutic applications for regulatory regions of DNA found in the T-cell receptor locus. Also during his undergraduate studies, he had opportunities to work at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories and at Columbia University. As a fellow of Cold Spring Harbor’s Undergraduate Research Program, he worked with Alea Mills, studying how mutations in the gene CHD5 affect tumorigenesis. As a fellow of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute-funded EXROP program, he worked with Stephen Goff at Columbia University Medical Center, investigating the structure of messenger ribonucleoprotein complexes. In his current research he is developing tools for building gene expression libraries and designing applications of these tools that are relevant for both clinical and research settings.