Rong Chen

Rong Chen, Ph.D., was the Director of the Clinical Genome Informatics Laboratory, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Chen is an expert on translational bioinformatics and has published more than 80 papers in journals such as Nature Biotechnology and The Lancet. He has developed numerous databases and software tools to interpret genomes to help drive clinical diagnosis, precision medicine, and therapeutic target discovery, including knowledge bases for various clinical genetic testing, VIAS for genetic variant annotation, ClinLabGeneticist for clinical exome sequencing, and ZDOCK, one of most widely-used protein-protein docking programs. Dr. Chen led the Resilience Project, a study designed to identify genetic ‘superheroes’ in more than 589,000 individuals, and a personalized cancer therapy project for precision medicine. He has illustrated the genetic landscapes of parathyroid carcinoma and Cushing’s disease, identified potential therapeutic targets for cardiovascular diseases, and identified diagnostic biomarkers for organ transplant rejection. Dr. Chen also developed novel methods to predict personal risk of disease by integrating genome sequencing, electronic medical records, and environmental factors. He published the first Clinical Assessment of Human Genome and was a leader in the development of the personal genome report. Before joining Mount Sinai, Dr. Chen built and launched the genomic medicine startup company, Personalis. He has also worked at Accelrys/BIOVIA, Quest Diagnostics Nichols Institute, Abgenix/Amgen, and Stanford University. Dr. Chen received his B.S. in Chemical Physics from the University of Science and Technology in China, his M.S. in Structure Biology from Chinese Academy of Sciences, and his Ph.D. in Bioinformatics from Boston University.