Hao Chen

SEO 1220,
Department of Computer Science,
University of Illinois Chicago,
Chicago, IL 60607
chenhao AT uic DOT edu
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Chicago, and a core member of the UIC Center for Bioinformatics and Quantitative Biology (CBQB). I also hold an affiliate faculty position at UIC Department of Biomedical Engineering. I currently serve as an Associate Editor for the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.
Before joining UIC, I completed my postdoctoral research in the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon University, working with Professor Ziv Bar-Joseph. I obtained my PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Riverside, where I was supervised by Professor Tao Jiang. I also spent several summers at Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research and Google during my PhD.
My research lies at the intersection of computational biology and AI/machine learning, with a focus on developing data-driven approaches to explore biological systems. By combining machine learning with single-cell and spatial omics data, my goal is to uncover the dynamics of gene regulation in cellular fates and the mechanisms of cellular responses to stimuli, with implications in drug discovery and disease modeling. I am also actively working on deep learning approaches for drug discovery, as well as genome and protein sequence modeling.
news
Aug 03, 2025 | Invited talk at ICIBM 2025 in Columbus, Ohio. |
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Mar 28, 2025 | Invited talk at MCBIOS 2025 in Salt Lake City. |
Mar 19, 2025 | Invited talk “Advancing spatial transcriptomics analysis to single-cell resolution with scResolve” at the University of Rochester CTSI colloquium. |
Feb 21, 2025 | Invited to serve as an Associate Editor for IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. |
Feb 07, 2025 | I will co-organize a session at MCBIOS 2025 on “AI methods and applications in single cell spatial omics”. |
Jan 27, 2025 | Our GIANT paper is accepted in Genome Research. |
Jan 27, 2025 | I gave a talk titled “Dissecting the spatiotemporal dynamics of single cells using machine learning” at CBQB seminar. |
Jan 15, 2025 | I gave a talk at BioLogic Summit 2025. |
Dec 17, 2024 | I joined the Richard and Loan Hill Department of Biomedical Engineering at UIC as an affiliate faculty member. |
Dec 13, 2024 | One paper accepted in principle in STAR Protocols. |