♦ We are currently accepting postdoc, graduate students and research technicians, please see the JOIN US  section or contact Joyce Chen (joycechen@uchicago.edu) for details.

The Chen lab’s interest is to apply next-generation technologies (e.g. human pluripotent stem cell-based modeling, organotypic tissue engineering by de- / re-cellularization and single-cell analysis) to pursue long-standing questions in cancer research, stem cell biology and regenerative medicine, especially in an era in which stem cell technology, disease modeling, and genomics are approaching a new level of sophistication.

Our current main focus is to understand how cancers initiate and progress using various stages of human cells derived from pluripotent or adult stem cells, and design strategies to diagnose, categorize and treat the diseases more effectively. Another line of our work is to directly model and study human tissues or diseases “in a dish”, by in vivo molecule-mediated humanized mouse models, ex vivo organotypic re-cellularization or in vitro tissue microfabrication.