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)

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 >$4.5 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-)

Rama completed the M.Sc. Biotechnology from the University of Hyderabad, India in 2010 and the PhD in computational biology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, India in 2018. He joined Dr. Bin Chen group in 2018. He is interested to apply single cell transcriptomic data into therapeutic discovery and integrate omics data to identify novel biomarkers.

Shreya Paithankar, MS

Technical Assistant (2018-)

Shreya received the MS in health informatics from GVSU. She provides bioinformatics support to lab researchers and collaborators. Her main tasks include developing and maintaining our RNA-Seq processing pipeline, expanding the OCTAD RNA-Seq database, and developing web portals.

Dimitri Joseph

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 connecting bioinformatics & Drug Discovery to identify novel mechanisms and validation in clinical models. His favorite organ/system is the brain and central nervous system.

Ruoqiao Chen

BMS PhD student (2021-)

Ruoqiao received the BS in medical science from Huazhong University of Science & Technology in China. Her current research focuses on surface protein expression prediction using transfer learning and deep learning.

Han Meng

Research Assistant (2021), CS graduate student(2022-)

Han received the MS in material science from MSU. She is a master student at CSE supervised by Dr. Chen and Dr. Zhou. Her current focus is on the improvement of the AI-based drug screening platform.

Dmitry Leshchiner, MD

Postdoctoral scholar(2022-)

Dmitry Leshchiner received the 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 the postdoc training at Boston College in 2020. In 2022, he joined the Chen lab and Horibata lab.

Xiaodan Zhang, MS

Data Science Specialist(2022-)

Xiaodan received the MS in statistics from the University of South Florida, and had over 10 years of teaching experience before joining the Chenlab to lead the EMR projects.

Yajing Ji, DO/PHD

Resident at Spectrum Health (2022-)

Yajing received the DO/PhD from MSU and started the residency at Spectrum Health in 2022. In Chen lab, she is interested in using machine learning to study cardiovascular diseases.

Yanzeng(Alex) Li

PhD student in biostatistics

Yanzeng is interested in survival analysis and EHR mining.