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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Nabasmita Talukdar, MS

PhD student in Biostats (2022-)

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

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Sardar Mehtab Bin Murtaza

Undergraduate in CS and Chemistry (2023-)

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

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Aakash Dave

Medical Student (2023-)

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

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Shubham Koirala (2024-)

PhD student in Genetics and Genome Sciences (2024-)

Shubham is interested in leveraging machine learning to discover biomarkers.

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We always welcome highly motivated trainees to join the lab. For postdoc candidates, please send your CV and research interests to Dr. Chen. For graduate students, depending on your interests and backgrounds, please apply through the BioMolecular Science program, the Genetics and Genome Sciences Program, the Biostatistics program, or the Computer Science Program. Feel free to approach Dr. Chen if you plan to apply. Chen lab has the tradition to host high-school summer interns every year. Please contact Dr. Chen before April if you are interested. We occasionally recruit undergraduate and medical students. For all the trainees, before the application, please ensure you have some experience with programming (R and Python are preferred) and statistics. The Resource page will direct you to some great sources to learn programming and statistics.


Alumni

Jing Xing postdoc 2018-2022 Young PI at Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences
Jeremy Haskins part-time technician 2020-2022 Senior Scientist at Altay Therapeutics
Mengying Sun CSE PhD student, 2019-2022, co-advised with Prof. Jiayu Zhou Data Scientist, Facebook(Meta)
Ke Liu Postdoc 2017-2021, Research Assistant Professor 2021-2022 Assistant Professor, Qilu Scholar, Shandong University
Eugene Chekalin Postdoc 2019-2021 senior computational biologist at Illumina
Austin VanVelsen 2020-2021 Medical student Medical student at CHM, MSU
Tyler VanVelsen 2020-2021 Medical student Medical student at CHM, MSU
Jeanne Yang 2021 Summer intern Undergraduate at UM
Shan-Ju Yeh 2019-2020 Visiting Scholar PhD student and then professor at Taiwan National Tsinghua University
Christopher Chang 2019-2020 capstone Medical student at COM
Krista Young 2019-2020 capstone Medical student at COM
Xiangyu Chen 2020 Summer Intern East Grand Rapids High School, admitted to UPenn
Yingying Wu 2019 Postdoc postdoc at Harvard, then AP at University of Houston
Rae Felismino 2019 capstone Medical student at COM
Cathy Lee 2019 capstone Medical student at COM
Suchir Gupta 2019 summer intern Grand Rapids Central High School, admitted to UM
Billy Zeng UCSF medical student 2017-2019 UCSF medical student
Albert Jiao Medical student 2018 matched Radiology at Harvard
Kasim Fassia Medical student 2018 Medical student at MSU
Patrick Newbury, MD Postdoc from 2018-2019 Radiation oncology resident at University of Oklahoma
Anthony Sciarini Intern from GVSU in 2018 summer and fall GVSU undergraduate
Keith Schmitt Intern from GVSU in 2018 summer and fall GVSU undergraduate
Anita Wen Summer intern from UC Davis in 2018 UC Davis
Before we moved to MSU in 2018
Jordan Spatz Medical student UCSF
Michael F. Sharpnack Medical student, volunteer Ohio State University
Reuben Sarwal Summary Intern Undergraduate, UC Berkeley
Tanisha Joshi Summary Intern High school
Jane Wei Summary Intern Undergraduate, Cornell University
Rachel (Menghua) Wu Summary Intern High school, accepted into MIT
Charles Pei Summary Intern High school, accepted into Harvard, co-mentored by Marina Sirota

Collaborators

  • Samuel So, MD (Asian Liver Center, Stanford): HCC drug validation
  • Haiyan Huang, PhD (Department of Statistics, UC Berkeley): statistical model development
  • Jiayu Zhou, PhD (Department of Computer Science, MSU): deep learning model development
  • Theodore Nicolaides, MD,PhD (New York University): DIPG validation
  • Richard Neubig, MD,PhD (MSU): Melanoma validation
  • Rajasekaran Surender, MD (Spectrum Health): MODS biomarker discovery
  • Xiaohong Li, PhD (VARI): cancer metastasis
  • Nick Duesbery, PhD (Spectrum Health): EMR mining
  • Andrei Goga, MD, PhD (Department of Medicine, UCSF)
  • ISPY team (Breast cancer, UCSF)
  • John Gordan, MD, PhD (Gastrointestinal Oncology, UCSF)
  • Katie Kelley, MD (Liver cancer, Department of Medicine, UCSF)
  • Ben Glicksberg, PhD (Institute for Computational Health Sciences, UCSF)
  • Marina, Sirota, PhD (Institute for Computational Health Sciences, UCSF)
  • Dexter Hadley, MD, PhD (Institute for Computational Health Sciences, UCSF)