Hao Chen

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).

Before joining UIC, I completed my postdoctoral research in the Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department at Carnegie Mellon University, working with Professors Ziv Bar-Joseph and Jose Lugo-Martinez. I obtained my PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Riverside in 2021, where I was supervised by Professor Tao Jiang. I received my Bachelor’s degree at Sichuan University in 2016, graduating from the Wu Yuzhang Honors College. During my undergraduate studies, I worked with Professor Jianyang Zeng at Tsinghua University. 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.

New! I am looking for motivated PhD students starting from Spring/Fall 2025. If you’re interested in joining my lab, please reach out! I also welcome undergraduate and master’s students with a passion for computational biology to apply for internships in my lab.