Jake Chen, PhD

Dr. Jake Y. Chen is a professor and Chief Bioinformatics Officer of the newly established Informatics Institute at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB). He holds a bachelor degree in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from Peking University of China and both MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities. Dr. Chen has more than 20 years of bioinformatics R&D experience. He is an internationally recognized expert in biological data mining, computational systems biology, and translational bioinformatics, with more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and numerous invited talks nationwide. He currently serves on the editorial boards of several journals including BMC Systems Biology, Personalized Medicine, and Network Biology, and on various grant panels in biological data analytics by NIH, NSF, and DOD. His research focuses on building quantitative biomolecular systems models from genomic and clinical big data, thus helping understand, simulate, and predict complex disease biology outcomes. As the Chief Bioinformatics Officer at UAB Informatics Institute, he oversees the development and execution of informatics strategic plans that enhance bioinformatics research, service, training, and outreach at UAB Medicine. Prior to join UAB, he holds tenured faculty positions at Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing and at Purdue University Computer and Information Science Department. He founded Indiana Center for Systems Biology and Personalized Medicine in 2007, and subsequently Zhejiang Institute of Biopharmaceutical Informatics and Technologies in China to pursue translational bioinformatics through regional and international collaborations. Prior to joining Academia in 2004, he worked as a bioinformatics computer scientist at Affymetrix in the Silicon Valley and a proteomics company in Salt Lake City to develop late-breaking DNA microarray and proteomics technologies. He was cited by HealthTechTopia as one of the ì17 Informatics Experts Worth Listening Toî in 2011. In 2012, he led his lab to receive a ìCancer Systems Biology Grand Challenge Awardî by Innocentive.com among over a thousand contenders. In 2013-15, he was honored three times as an ìIndiana Technology Educator of the Yearî MIRA Award finalist, for his contribution to informatics research, education, and regional outreach. He is currently the President-elect and a board member of Mid-south Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Society (MCBIOS). He is also an entrepreneur who is passionate about making emerging biomedical data easy to use by growing Medicine 2.0 stakeholders.