Dr. Fei Chen

Dr. Fei Chen is currently a Core Faculty member at the Broad Institute, and assistant professor at Harvard Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology.

During the course of his doctoral research, Chen co-invented expansion microscopy, a breakthrough technique that allows for super-resolution imaging of biological samples with conventional light microscopes. As an independent Fellow at the Broad, his lab continued to pioneer novel tools at the intersection of genomics and microscopy to uniquely illuminate biological pathways and function. These include, Slide-seq, a novel technology for transcriptome-wide gene expression profiling with near-single-cell spatial resolution.

At Harvard and as a Core Member of the Broad Institute, Dr. Chen’s laboratory sets out to build a set of tools which will bridge single-cell genomics with space and timeto enable discoveries of where cell types are localized within intact tissues, when relevant transcriptional modules are active. To do this, the lab is developing novel technologies at the intersection of microscopy, genomics, and synthetic biology.  We are applying these tools to learn organizational principles governing neurodevelopment, and cellular mechanisms of disorganization during neuronal injury and disease.

He obtained his Ph.D. in biological engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Ed Boyden. Dr. Chen was a Schmidt Fellow at the Broad Institute. His awards include the National Institutes of Health Director’s Early Independence Award and the Allen Distinguished Investigator Award.