News & Media

Yukun Tan organized a 2024 HTAN Jamboree workshop on spatial transcriptional gradient analysis at NIH.

Ken Chen received MD Anderson's Celebration of Faculty Excellence in Research Excellence, 2024.

We received CZI Data Insight Award Cycle 3 for examining somatic mutations in single-cell sequencing data with Rui Chen lab.

Shan (Chloe) He's talk was recognized as the most outstanding presentation at the inaugural NCI ITCR Trainee Symposium.

Our team Yinyang (Yujia Wang, Stefano Casarin, May Daher, Vakul Mohanty, Ken Chen) with the goal to digitalize CAR-NK Cell therapy,  has won the The Complement Animal Research In Experimentation (Complement-ARIE) Challenge/Prize ($50K), sponsored by NIH Common Fund for developing in silico cell therapy simulators.

Drs. Yukun Tan and Merve Dede ranked #1 in the subtask2 (breast cancer cohort) of an international challenge that applies artificial intelligence (AI), particularly natural language processing (NLP) powered by large language models (LLM) for "Chemotherapy Treatment Timelines Extraction from the Clinical Narrative."

Satvik Elayavalli (CPRIT summer intern, 2023) was named a Goldwater scholar at Emory University.

We were awarded as part of an ARPR-H Project, THOR, with investigators from Rice University, University of Houston, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Northwestern University, among others.

Xianli Jiang (postdoc) was selected to receive a 2023 Conquer Cancer Merit Award by the ASCO Foundation Scientific Program Committee.

Ken Chen received the Highest Commendation from the University of Texas Graduate School of Biomedical Science (GSBS) program.

Holly Hill defended Ph.D. in epidemiology at UTHealth School of Public Health.

Yuefan Huang defended Ph.D. in biostats at UTHealth School of Public Health.

Ken Chen was selected as the recipient of the Robert M. Chamberlain Distinguished Mentor Award by the MD Anderson Cancer Center Postdoctoral Association.

Shaoheng Liang defended Ph.D. in computer science at Rice University.

Shan He (graduate research assistant) received Deans Excellence Scholarship for 2022-2023.

Holly Hill (graduate research assistant) received a NCI F99/K00 award.

Alice was selected as a Regeneron STS Top 300 scholar  and 2022 Awardee for Aspirations in Computing (AiC).

Alice received college admission offers from MIT, CALTECH and Harvard. Congrats!

Alice Feng (a high school intern) has a first author long-abstract accepted by Machine-Learning in Computational Biology (MLCB) 2021, supervised primarily by Shaoheng Liang (Ph.D. student).

We received Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative Genetic Ancestry Network award with Rui Chen lab (BCM, lead PI) and several labs in the US.

Ken Chen (PI) received MDA Presidential Recognition of Faculty Excellence in Research Excellence.

Xianli Jiang (Postdoc) received the CPRIT CCBTP postdoc fellowship award.

Ken Chen (PI) received Oden Institute-TACC-MDACC collaboration award on computational oncology with Steven Yi at UT Austin.

Vakul Mohanty (Postdoc) published a first-author paper on Cell Reports Medicine, a new top biomedical research journal, 2021 and was featured in MD Anderson Research Highlights.

Ken Chen received early promotion to full Professor, starting in September 2021.

Shaoheng Liang, Ph.D., published a first author paper on Nature Computational Science, a new top CompBio journal. Learn more in the MD Anderson news release and on Phys.org

The BreakDancer software that Ken Chen developed are quoted as part of the Nature: Milestones in Genomic Sequencing, under "An explosion of computational tools".   So were the projects Ken Chen involved in: sequencing the first cancer AML genome (Ley et al., Nature 2008), under "A sequencing revolution in cancer" and the HapMap/1000 Genomes project, under "Cataloguing a public genome".

Fang Wang (postdoc) started as a professor at Sun Yat-Sen University, in Guangzhou, China.

Our group received a three-year award from NCI ITCR U01 program for developing widely used cancer informatics tools.

Former Ph.D. student Xian Fan started as a tenure-track assistant professor at Florida State University. 

Former postdoc Wanding Zhou started as a tenure-track assistant professor at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP.)

Our group received three-year awards from the CZI Seed Network to establish human cell atlas of breast with Nick Navin, Ph.D. and of retina with Rui Chen, Ph.D., starting summer 2019.

Ph.D. student Hamim started as a tenure-track assistant professor in Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in fall 2019.

Postdoc Fang Wang published a first-author paper in Nature Methods’ May 2019 issue.

Ph.D. student Ramiz was awarded an NLM fellowship to perform knowledge modeling/acquisition from electronic medical record EMR data.

Ken Chen received an independent investigator award from CPRIT to investigate cancer genome instability and related therapeutics.

Ken Chen received an award from Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative for developing novel single-cell data analysis methods.

SevenBridges published a nice story about how our tool, novoBreak, is optimized in the cancer genome cloud.

Zechen started as a tenure-track assistant professor at University of Alabama, Birmingham in March.

Postdoc Zechen’s first author paper (novoBreak) was published in Nature Methods

Student Hamim's first author paper (Monovar) published in Nature Methods.

Ken Chen was named a 2016-2017 Andrew Sabin Family Fellow.

Ken Chen received early promotion to Associate Professor in September.

Our systematic study of 1,000 cancer patients identified pathogenic germline variants missed by standard testing, Meric et al., 2015

Postdoc Zechen Chong was named a 2015 Keck fellow.

Our group obtained an R01 supplement award to test NCI Cloud Pilot Centers.

The T200 (MD Anderson Institute of Personalized Cancer Therapy) platform paper led by our group published in Chen et al., Clinical Chemistry, 2015. So far, this platform has been applied to study over 10,000 MD Anderson tumor samples, 2015.

Student Tenghui Chen received a 2015 President's Research Scholarship Award and a 2015 Deans Gee Family Legacy award from MD Anderson Cancer Center UTHealth Houston Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences.

Postdoc Wanding Zhou and student Tenghui Chen were co-first authors on a paper (TransVar) published in Nature Methods.

SV tools developed by this group identified a driver gene fusion in sporadic Medullary Thyroid Carcinoma, Grubbs et al., 2014.

Postdoc Zechen Chong ranked No. 1 in ICGC-TCGA DREAM 8.5 somatic mutation calling structural variation sub-challenge, 2014. Watch the report by Paul Boutros

Student Xian Fan published two first author papers

Postdoc Wanding Zhou was named an MD Anderson Odyssey Fellow

Ken Chen was awarded a U01 sub-award to establish informatics for routine patient genomic profiling.

Ken Chen was awarded a U41 sub-award with the Human Genome Structural Variation Consortium (formerly, 1000 Genomes SV group) from NHGRI to study structural variation in human population using the 2nd and 3rd generation sequencing.

Ken Chen was awarded an NCI R01 grant to delineate structural heterogeneity in cancer genomes.