Kaifu Chen, PhD

Kaifu is currently a Professor in the Pediatrics Department of Harvard Medical School and the Director of Computational Biology in the Cardiology Department of Boston Children’s Hospital. His lab develops bioinformatics methods to understand genetic, epigenetic, and molecular signaling mechanisms in the expression regulation of cell identity genes.

Kaifu is also a faculty member of the PhD Program in Bioinformatics and Integrative Genomics at Harvard Medical School, an Affiliated Member of the Epigenomics Program in the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a member of the Prostate Cancer Program in the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, and a member of the Quantitative Genomics Program in the Harvard Public Health School.

Kaifu received B.S. in Biophysics at the Nankai University in 2004. He then received his Ph.D. training in Genomics (Bioinformatics) in the lab of Dr. Jun Yu (于军) at the Beijing Institute of Genomics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and performed Bioinformatics research at his postdoctoral stage in the lab of Dr. Wei Li (李蔚) at the Baylor College of medicine (the Li Lab is now at UC Irvine). He started the Chen lab as an Assistant Professor of Weill Cornell Medical College at Houston Methodist Hospital in 2015. Thereafter, he became an Associate Professor there and founded their Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology as the Director. He then moved to Harvard in 2020.