Hao Chen joins CS faculty
Hao Chen joins CS faculty Heading link
Assistant Professor Hao Chen joins the CS department on November 1. Chen’s research is the intersection of machine learning and biology.
Chen was a postdoctoral fellow in the computational biology department at Carnegie Mellon University prior to joining UIC. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of California at Riverside and completed his undergraduate work at Sichuan University in Chengdu, China.
Chen is pleased to join UIC for its strong computer science department and for collaboration opportunities with researchers in biomedical engineering and with the University of Illinois College of Medicine. He will be part of the College of Engineering’s Center for Bioinformatics and Quantitative Biology.
One of Chen’s research goals is to uncover gene regulatory mechanisms in disease and tissue development.
“We want to know why diverse cell types arise from the same stem cells, and how gene regulation changes during aging and in diseases such as cancer,” Chen said. “Understanding how gene misregulation occurs will help us understand the disease.”
Another of Chen’s focus areas is drug discovery. Using machine learning algorithms can greatly accelerate the process of identifying new compounds and determining what existing drugs work best to cure emerging diseases.
New sequencing technologies now enable precise measurement of gene expression across about 20,000 genes in individual cells, creating massive data sets when studying complex organisms. Developing algorithms that efficiently process this data is essential to biological discovery.
Chen will begin teaching in the Spring 2025 semester.