Bin Chen, PhD

Principal Investigator, Associate Professor (CV)

Dept. of Pediatrics and Human Development

Dept. of Pharmacology and Toxicology

Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering (adjunct)

Dept. of Epidemiology and Biostatistics (adjunct)

Bin was recruited to MSU through the Global Impact Initiative. Prior to this position, Bin was a faculty member (instructor, assistant professor) at UCSF for three years. Bin trained as a chemist in college, worked as a software engineer before graduate school, trained as a chem/bioinformatician in graduate school, worked as a computational scientist at Novartis, Pfizer and Merck. He received his PhD in informatics at Indiana University, Bloomington and pursued his postdoctoral training in Dr. Atul Butte's lab at Stanford University. Bin co-founded DahShu, a non-profit organization to promote research and education in data sciences. As a PI, he has received >$7 million research funding. He has also contributed to a number of big grants (e.g., P01 and U24) as a co-investigator. During weekends, Bin plays soccer or coaches kids to play soccer.

Rama Shankar, PhD

Postdoctoral Scholar (2018-), K99/R00 Awardee

Rama completed his MS in Biotechnology from the University of Hyderabad, India, in 2010, and his PhD in Computational Biology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India, in 2018. He joined the Chen lab in 2018. He is interested in applying single-cell transcriptomics to identify novel biomarkers.

Shreya Paithankar, MS

Technical Assistant (2018-)

Shreya received her MS in Health Informatics from GVSU. She provides bioinformatics support to lab researchers and collaborators. Her main responsibilities include developing and maintaining the RNA-Seq processing pipeline, expanding the OCTAD RNA-Seq database, curating datasets, and developing web portals.

Dimitri Joseph, MS

DO/PhD student (2020-)

Dimitri is a DO/PhD candidate pursuing a graduate degree in Pharmacology and Toxicology. He received his MSc in Biochemistry and Cell Biology from Stony Brook University. He is interested in leveraging bioinformatics to understand health disparities and immunology.

Ruoqiao Chen, BS

BMS PhD student (2021-)

Ruoqiao received her BS in Medical Science from Huazhong University of Science & Technology in China. Her current research focuses on developing machine learning models to predict surface protein expression and developing foundation models for drug discovery.

Dmitry Leshchiner, MD

Postdoctoral scholar (2022-)

Dmitry Leshchiner received his MD from I.M. Sechenov First Moscow State Medical University and then spent a couple of years at Harvard Medical School as a research associate before pursuing postdoctoral training at Boston College in 2020. In 2022, he joined the Chen lab and Horibata lab. He is interested in utilizing computational tools to discover novel therapeutics.

Xiaodan Zhang, MS

Data Science Specialist (2022-)

Xiaodan received her MS in Statistics from the University of South Florida and had over 10 years of teaching experience before joining the Chen lab to lead the EHR projects.

Nabasmita Talukdar, MS

PhD student in Biostats (2022-)

Nabas received her MS in Statistics from Delhi University in India. She is interested in using real-world data to discover better therapeutics.

Sardar Mehtab Bin Murtaza

Undergraduate in CS and Chemistry (2023-)

As a double-major undergraduate, Mehtab is interested in creating a database of drug-induced gene expression profiles using large language models.

Aakash Dave, BS

Medical Student (2023-)

Aakash is interested in leveraging his medical expertise and our computational platforms to discover repurposing candidates for Autism.

Shubham Koirala, BS

PhD student in Genetics and Genome Sciences (2024-)

Shubham received his BS in Biotechnology from Kathmandu University, Nepal. He is interested in leveraging machine learning and large-scale transcriptomics to discover new biomarkers for pediatric cancers.

Lingxiao Li, MS

PhD student in CS (2024-), co-advised with Prof. Jiayu Zhou

Lingxiao received his MS in Computer Science from Boston University. He is interested in multimodal generative AI for drug discovery.

Linqing Mo

MS student in data science (2024-), co-advised with Prof. Jiayu Zhou

Linqing received his BS in Chemistry from University of Science and Technology of China. He is interested in representation learning in drug discovery.