Gwen Cusing

Gwen Cusing

BMS Graduate Student (joint with Julia Carnevale)

I grew up in the Bay Area and earned my B.S. in Biology from Northeastern University in Boston, MA in 2021. Prior to starting at UCSF, I worked at various biotech companies in the Boston area focused on developing immunotherapies for cancer. Most recently, I worked at Tango Therapeutics, a precision oncology company leveraging synthetic lethality to develop therapeutics for cancer. There, I designed and executed enCas12a combo CRISPR screens to discover gene pairs in which loss of both genes renders cancer cells sensitive to immune- mediated killing. In 2024, I started graduate school as a part of UCSF’s Biomedical Sciences program. Outside of lab, you can find me running or hiking, exploring coffee shops with friends, reading books, or doing various crafts like knitting or scrapbooking.

In co-mentorship with Dr. Julia Carnevale, I aim to integrate functional genomics and synthetic biology approaches to design better T cell-based therapies for solid tumors.