Profile
Huanhuan Joyce Chen
Assistant Professor
Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and Ben May Department for Cancer Research
Huanhuan Joyce Chen’s research is focused on the relationship between the differentiation stages of cell lineages and the mutations of cancer genes that initiate tumorigenesis and together determine the cancer cell phenotype, using pulmonary or intestinal lineage cells through differentiation of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs). Her lab is also generating myeloid lineage cells from hPSCs or induced pluripotent cells (iPSC) and using hPSC-derived cells for modeling and studying innate immunology in diseases. Another line of her work is to develop disease models for studying cell biology and cancer diseases using regenerative and genetic engineering technologies. These technologies include chemokine-mediated orthotopic xenograft models through mouse blastocyst injection, ex vivo bio-artificial colorectal neoplasms through the technology of decellularization/recellularization, and in vitro microfabrication of human liver and gastrointestinal tract.
Her work has been published in Nature, Nature Biotechnology, Cell Stem Cell, Journal of Experimental Medicine, Journal of Clinical Investigation, Lab on a Chip, and other journals.
Chen graduated from Zhejiang University in China with a PharmD in pharmaceutical sciences. She then earned her PhD in biomedical engineering at Cornell University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Weill Cornell Medicine.