Charis Jones (aka Charis Himeda, PhD) is a research professor and co-founder of RENOGENYX, a company dedicated to developing treatments for Facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy. She won the FSHD Society's inaugural Young Investigator award, and has been interviewed by The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, and The Boston Business Journal for engineering FSHD therapeutics using CRISPR gene modifying technology. At night, Dr. Himeda doffs her lab gloves to pen speculative fiction about renegade scientists who do things she would never dream of doing. She is a three-time winner in the Pacific Northwest Writer's Association contest, a winner in the Sandy, the Zebulon, and the Colorado Gold contests, a semifinalist in the Chanticleer International Book Awards, a finalist in the Page Turner Awards, and a quarterfinalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of literary magazines and in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2021.