Gary Armstrong is Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at the Montreal Neurological Institute and a Killam Laureate. His research focuses on furthering our understanding of synaptic defects arising both at peripheral neuromuscular junctions and central spinal cord synapses in the neurodegenerative disease Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). To investigate these defects his research team uses zebrafish, an animal model uniquely suited for investigations (using electrophysiological, optogenetic, and imaging approaches) pertaining to synaptic function at all levels of the motor system. In addition, this animal model lends easily to genomic manipulations where analogous disease-associated mutations can be edited into zebrafish orthologs of human genes involved with ALS (e.g. TARDBP, FUS, CHCHD10, TBK1 and C9orf72) using the clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPRs) mutagenic system.