Yiyun Rao is a Ph.D. candidate in the Molecular, Cellular, and Integrative Biosciences program at Penn State. She is co-advised by the Pritchard and O’Brien labs and focuses on exploring the functional impact of synonymous mutations in cancer and fitness contexts. Her research spans computational biology and functional genomic screens: in the former, she applies statistical models to identify cancer genes enriched with synonymous mutations; in the latter, she employs CRISPR base-editing screens to characterize their functional effects in human populations. The latter will be the focus of her talk. Additionally, as part of her Ph.D., she has studied complex combinatorial genotype-phenotype maps to investigate the genetic architecture underlying the evolution and function of the kinase phosphate-binding loop.