Jones, Charis: - Charis Jones (aka Charis Himeda, PhD) is an award-winning author and biomedical researcher. She 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 PNWA literary contest, a semifinalist for the BookLife Prize, and a finalist for the Eric Hoffer First Horizon Award and Grand Prize, the American Book Fest Best Book Awards, the Foreword INDIES Awards, the Indies Today Awards, the National Indie Excellence Awards, the Readers' Favorite Awards, and the Page Turner Awards. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of literary magazines and in The Best American Mystery and Suspense 2021.