Cory Smith is the Head of Discovery Platforms and scientific co-founder of GCTx. Cory is a pioneer in synthetic biology, genome editing, and evaluation of genomic safety after cell line engineering. Cory is co-inventor of multiple patents in the fields of genome engineering, de-extinction, and stem cell differentiation. Cory has been featured in CBS's 60 minutes, MIT Technology Review, and the Genetic Literacy Project.

Cory completed his Ph.D. in Human Genetics in the lab of Dr. Linzhao Cheng, at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. His work focused on evaluating the genomic safety of multiple genome editing platforms by performing whole genome sequencing and analysis. Cory was the first to demonstrate that CRISPR/Cas9 genome engineering could be used to target a disease allele, the V617F mutation that causes cancer in patients with Myeloproliferative neoplasm, but not alter the wild type allele in human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs).

Cory completed his postdoctoral fellowship in the lab of Dr. George Church at Harvard Medical School where he developed new tools to enable highly multiplexed genome editing. He modified up to 13,200 genomic loci within a single cell without significant genome rearrangement or disruption. This work overcame the toxicity limitation that prevented large-scale genome editing in human iPSCs and has expanded the editing boundary by three orders of magnitude.