Armen Kelikian is a graduate student in the Niyogi Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. His research focuses on the various mechanisms and regulatory dynamics of non-photochemical quenching (NPQ), or the suite of photoprotective processes by which plants dissipate excess light energy as heat. He is interested in the relaxation kinetics of these NPQ processes upon transition from excess to limiting light conditions. For the RIPE project, Kelikian is working to characterize gene-edited promoter alleles of OsPsbS1 in rice, which encodes a protein responsible for the rapid induction/relaxation of NPQ. He received his bachelor's degree in genetics & plant biology at Berkeley, where he completed his honors thesis.