Principal Investigator

Dr. Fei Chen is currently a Core Faculty member at the Broad Institute and assistant professor at Harvard Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. He obtained his Ph.D. in biological engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016. Fei was a Schmidt Fellow at the Broad Institute from 2017-2020.

Postdoctoral Associate

Ehsan Habibi is a postdoctoral associate at the Broad Institute. He is a joint member of the Chen Lab and Aviv Regev Lab. Ehsan obtained his Ph.D. degree with cum laude distinction in molecular biology from Radboud University in the Netherlands under the supervision of Prof. Henk Stunnenberg. He studied epigenetic aspects of a new culture condition that was invented to maintain embryonic stem cells. Ehsan is currently interested in using and developing in situ/single cell quantification methods to understand embryogenesis and tissue formation.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Dr. Andy Russell is currently an EMBO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Broad Institute. He completed his Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge and the Wellcome Sanger Institute under the supervision of Thierry Voet, Mara Lawniczak, and Oliver Billker, where he developed and applied single-cell sequencing technologies to understand malaria parasite developmental decision making. He is currently developing novel tools for spatially-resolved multiomics sequencing, in order to better understand communicable and non-communicable diseases.

Postdoctoral Associate

Dawei Sun is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Broad Institute. He graduated from the Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Dr. Emma Rawlins, where he used single cell sequencing, CRISPRi screen and organoid approaches to study human lung development. In the Chen Lab, he is currently seeking to combine functional genomics and spatial techniques to investigate tissue development and regeneration.

Postdoctoral Associate

Dongshunyi “Dora” Li is a EWSC Postdoctoral Fellow at the Broad Institute, jointly advised by Caroline Uhler. She obtained her Ph.D. in computational biology from Carnegie Mellon University under the supervision of Ziv Bar-Joseph, where she developed machine learning (ML) methods to study cell-cell interactions and their impact on dynamic biological processes using spatio-temporal single cell data. Dora is currently interested in building ML methods to learn multi-scale spatial interactions and organizations from spatial transcriptomics data.

Postdoctoral Associate

Yunhao Bai is a postdoc associate at the Broad Institute. He obtained his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Stanford University under the supervision of Prof. Garry Nolan, where he mainly focused on combining Expansion Microscopy with Mass Spectrometry Imaging for proteomics and glycomics. Before that, Yunhao graduated with a B.S. in Chemistry from Tsinghua University. His current interests lie in highly-multiplexed spatial techniques with super-resolution or in living systems.

Graduate Student

Jeremy Koob graduated from Brandeis University with a combined B.S./M.S. in Chemistry and Biochemistry, where he worked as an undergraduate in the labs of Maria Pandelia and Christine Thomas. Prior to beginning his PhD studies, Jeremy worked in Feng Zhang’s lab on Cas13 based technologies for virus detection and RNA editing. Currently, Jeremy is a graduate student in the Harvard MCO program (MCB department). Jeremy joined the Chen lab in 2020 and is interested in developing new molecular tools for reading and recording temporal information in living systems.

Graduate Student

Dawn Chen is a graduate student in the Harvard Systems, Synthetic and Quantitative Biology program. She graduated from Yale University with a B.S./M.S. in biochemistry and statistics. During her undergrad, she worked in the Ronald Breaker Lab to discover new structured noncoding RNAs in nature, and also with Hongyu Zhao to analyze polygenic and lifestyle risk for cardiovascular disease. After undergrad, she worked as a Software Engineer at Google. In the Chen Lab, Dawn is interested in developing new RNA-based tools for transcript and cell-type sensing.

Graduate Student

Chenlei Hu graduated from Peking University with a B.S. in Biological Science and Physics. Before going to graduate school, she explored research in Drosophila development, cell biology of nuclear protein, as well as biophysics of cytoplasm and cytoskeleton. Now Chenlei is a graduate student in the Harvard MCO program. In the Chen lab, she wants to know more about how cells are organized subcellularly and use the knowledge to engineer the cellular machine.

Graduate Student

Jackson Weir is a Harvard graduate student in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program. He previously graduated from the University of New Brunswick with a B.Sc. in Cellular and Molecular Biology. During undergrad, he researched blood cancer biology and studied new ways to activate the anti-cancer immune response. In the Chen Lab, Jackson is interested in developing spatial omics technology to answer key questions in cancer evolution and tumor microenvironment dynamics.

Graduate Student

Sandeep Kambhampati is a graduate student in the Harvard Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics (BIG) PhD program. He graduated in 2021 with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering from Johns Hopkins, where he worked in the labs of Chulan Kwon and Andrew Feinberg. He joined the Chen lab with an interest in using machine learning approaches to draw biological insights from new types of genomics data. He is excited about using spatial genomics to build ML models of tissue organization in order to study how this organization arises during development and is disrupted during disease.

Graduate Student

Benno Orr is a graduate student in the Harvard Biological and Biomedical Sciences program. He completed a B.Sc. in Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the University of Toronto and worked in Dr. Ronald Cohn’s lab at SickKids. Benno is interested in spatial perturbation screens.

Graduate Student

Kevin is currently pursuing his graduate studies in the Chemical Physics program at Harvard University. He holds a Master of Science in Chemistry from National Chiao Tung University. Prior to enrolling in the Harvard CCB program, his research focused on exploring the connection between cardiovascular disease and gut microbiota, along with investigating the biophysical characteristics of cardiomyocytes using multiphoton microscopy. Presently, Kevin is engaged in the development of innovative spatial genomics tools aimed at gaining insights into tissue dynamics.

Graduate Student

Maile is a graduate student in the Harvard Systems, Synthetic and Quantitative Biology program. She graduated from MIT with a B.S. in Biological Engineering. During undergrad, she worked in Dave Bartel’s lab researching the systematic requirements of how microRNAs are selectively degraded by mRNAs and lncRNAs. In the Chen Lab, Maile is interested in building molecular tools for cell-type specificity and temporal recording.

Computational Associate I

Qiyu Gong is a Computational Associate in the Chen lab. She graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2022 with a M.Sc in Immunology. She has been working on single-cell and spatial transcriptomics data analysis for the past 2 years, developing an interest in the algorithms of various tools. Currently, her work at Chen Lab involves building analysis tools for Slide-tag as well as conducting analyses.

Senior Computational Associate

Research Associate II

Yifan Zhang is a Research Associate in the Chen lab. He graduated from Haverford College in 2021 with a B.Sc in Anthropology and Biochemistry. At Haverford, he used genetic and computational tools to study the biochemistry and cell biology of alpha-synuclein, a pathogenic protein in Parkinson’s disease. In the Chen lab, Yifan is interested in the spatiotemporal control of protein expression.

Research Associate I

Ruth is a Research Associate jointly with Sophia Liu’s lab. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2022 with a B.S. in Biology with a concentration in Genetics and Genomics. At UT, she worked on testing the feasibility of a transposition-based genome-wide approach to identify the hitchhiking hotspots of the 2-micron selfish DNA element in the yeast genome. Presently, she works on developing spatial transcriptomics tools for immune profiling over aging. She is interested in studying female reproductive health and biology.

Research Associate I

Andrea is a Research Associate in the Chen Lab, she obtained her B.S. in Biotechnology Engineering from the Tecnologico de Monterrey in 2023. During her studies she worked on characterizing and creating tools to predict changes in synthetic gut microbiota bacterial communities. She also worked with Harvard Medical school in her senior year in organ-on-a-chip systems, tissue engineering using hydrogel scaffolds for muscle, bone and heart tissue and biosensing technologies for in vitro tissue development. She is interested in developing molecular technologies for disease treatment and immunology.

Supervisor, Laboratory Operations

Giovanni is the Laboratory Operations Supervisor for the Chen Lab. He graduated from Syracuse University in 2019 with a B.S. in Biotechnology. Previously, he studied regulatory T cells in adipose tissue in Louise D’Cruz’s lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Giovanni will be developing Slide-Seq & genomic technologies in the Chen Lab.

Senior Administrative Assistant

Jared Spencer is the Administrative Assistant to Fei Chen and his lab. Born and raised in Cambridge, Jared ventured off to Purdue University and earned a B.S. in Hospitality and Tourism Management. In the last several years, Jared worked in the luxury hotel industry.

We are looking for you!

Email chenf@broadinstitute.org if you want to join the Chen lab family!