Dr. Fei Chen is an assistant professor at the Harvard Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, and a Core Faculty member at the Broad Institute.
During his doctoral research, Chen co-invented expansion microscopy, a breakthrough technique that allows for super-resolution imaging of biological samples with conventional light microscopes. As an independent Fellow at the Broad, his lab continued to pioneer novel tools at the intersection of genomics and microscopy to uniquely illuminate biological pathways and function. These include Slide-seq, a novel technology for transcriptome-wide gene expression profiling with near-single-cell spatial resolution.
At Harvard and the Broad Institute, Dr. Chen’s laboratory sets out to build a set of tools which will bridge single-cell genomics with space and time – to enable discoveries of where cell types are localized within intact tissues, when relevant transcriptional modules are active. To do this, the lab is developing novel technologies at the intersection of microscopy, genomics, and synthetic biology. The lab is applying these tools to learn organizational principles governing development, and cellular mechanisms of disorganization during injury and disease.
Dr. Chen obtained his Ph.D. in biological engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a Schmidt Fellow at the Broad Institute. His awards include the Allen Distinguished Investigator Award, the Searle Scholars Award and the NYSCF Robertson Investigator Award.