About Zhong Chen, PhD

I have successfully accomplished my professional goals as an Assistant Research Professor in all aspects of my role. As one of the major investigators, I fulfilled our U01 2024-2025 milestones. Specifically, with the help and support from my colleagues, I completed all the proposed 10x Visium spatial gene expression and Visium adjacent Multiome data collection. I tested single cell DNA methylation, genomic DNA methylation, and single cell histone methylation. In a supporting role, I performed single cell gene expression analysis for Dr. Russel Brown's and Dr. Joseph Cheer’s single cell RNA-seq data. In seeking future grant opportunity, I piloted the research on the influence of THC on rat brain development. As co-author, I published three research papers in peer-reviewed journal and prepared three manuscripts either as first author or major contributor. Although I did not have teaching assignment, I have been actively mentoring lab research assistant, graduate student, and postdoctoral researcher. I incorporate the hand-on laboratory trainings, study design, troubleshooting into an encouraging learning process. In the meanwhile, I have been actively participating online trainings offered by leading biotechnology companies, such as 10x Genomics, Bimodal, EpiCypher, etc, to keep me in line with the most advanced NGS technologies, which help to improve our research at Loma Linda University. I kept focused on learned some new bioinformatic tools to analyze the spatial transcriptomic data at single cell resolution, which helped to understand the prenatal e-cigarette exposure on the development of central nerve system at specific cell types in the context of their spatial brain locations.