Fei Chen, 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.
Fei was an Axline scholar at the California Institute of Technology and graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering in 2011.
Hattie Chung, Postdoctoral Associate
Sarah Mangiameli, Postdoctoral Associate
Sarah Mangiameli is a postdoctoral associate at the Broad institute. Previously, Sarah completed her Ph.D. in physics at the University of Washington, where she applied single-molecule imaging to observe and quantify the dynamics of bacterial replication complexes in individual living cells. In the Chen lab, Sarah is interested in building new technologies for spatially-resolved DNA sequencing.
Ehsan Habibi, 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. He showed not only that these cells are a better representation of their in vivo counterpart, the E4.5 embryo, but also that they differ drastically from the traditional assumptions that has been held in the field for more than four decades. He also explored the contribution of different mechanisms involved in DNA methylation erasure (DNA Demethylation) and proposed that DNA demethylation in ESCs, PGCs, and preimplantation embryos can be formulated in a model in which impaired maintenance plays the main role. He also explored the early and transient epigenetic and transcriptional changes associated with primary monocyte-to-macrophage differentiation, and induction of innate immune tolerance or training, the main characteristics of sepsis. Ehsan is currently interested in using and developing in situ/single cell quantification methods to understand embryogenesis and tissue formation.
Andy Russell, 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.
Dawei Sun, 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.
Dylan Cable, Graduate Student
Dylan Cable graduated from Stanford in 2018 with a B.S. in mathematics, obtaining a background in statistics and applied math. As an undergraduate, Dylan did research in probability theory, where he characterized the behavior of a system of randomly interacting particles. He also analyzed fMRI data to examine whether single neuron recordings can be measured non-invasively from humans. Now a graduate student in Computer Science at MIT, Dylan joined The Chen Lab because he wants to develop novel methods for collecting biological data in addition to creating mathematical methods for analyzing biological data.
Sophia Liu, Graduate Student
Sophia Liu is a graduate student in the Harvard Biophysics program and affiliated with the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology (HST) Medical Engineering and Medical Physics (MEMP) program. She is jointly a member of the the Chen Lab and Eric Lander's Lab. Sophia graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in chemical-biological engineering from MIT, and worked as an undergraduate in Robert Langer's Lab and Alex Shalek's Lab. She is interested in applying molecular biology to create tools to understand cellular dynamics.
Jeremy Koob, 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.
Dawn Chen, 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.
Chenlei Hu, 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.
Jackson Weir, 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.
Sandeep Kambhampati, 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.
Giovanni Marrero, Research Associate III & Lab Manager
Giovanni is a Research Associate and the Lab Manager 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.
Irving Barrera, Research Associate II
Irving is a Research Associate in the Chen lab and the Macosko lab. He was born and raised in Mexico City, and he graduated from Earlham College in 2020 with a B.A. in Biochemistry. In college, Irving became very passionate about the field of phenomics. He has participated in different research projects involved in the characterization of complex phenotypes. He is working on the optimization and application of Slide-seq, and would like to develop protocols for studying the phenotypes of neuropsychiatric diseases.
Yifan Zhang, 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.
Ruth Raichur, Research Associate I
Ruth is a Research Associate in the Chen Lab. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2022 earning 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. In the Chen Lab, she will be working on Slide-DNA-seq technology alongside Drs. Sarah Mangiameli and Andy Russell.
Anisha Laumas, Undergraduate Student
Anisha Laumas is an undergraduate concentrating in Integrative Biology at Harvard College. She has worked in the Chen Lab since summer of 2020. In high school, she worked in Prof. Diane Krause’s lab at the Yale School of Medicine studying hematopoietic progenitor cell differentiation. Anisha is interested in using computational tools to better understand genomics and transcriptomics as well as applying spatial and in situ technologies to various biological contexts.
Jared Spencer, 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.
Lab Alumni
Luyi Tian
Julie Dobkin
Haiqi Chen
Jamie Marshall
Evan Murray
Andrew Payne
Julia Morriss
Linlin Chen
Tongtong Zhao
Shirin Shivaei
Sam Rodriques
Sam Padula