What’s happening in the lab

Our paper on the functional landscape of non-canonical open reading frames in coordinating cell fate is out in Molecular Cell. Congratulations to Kaiyuan and the team — this is the first flagship paper from the lab.

Jin gave an invited talk at Perturb2026 in Vienna — Large-scale Perturb-seq in primary human disease models: disease-reversal programs and virtual cell perturbation mapping. First full public airing of the lab’s virtual-cell effort.

Yuan-Hung Lo’s paper on large-scale CRISPR screening in primary human 3D gastric organoids is out in Nature Communications — a long-running collaboration with the Kuo lab at Stanford.

Jin gave an invited talk at the Keystone Symposium "Microproteins: from Discovery to Applications" — Coding or non-coding? Illuminating the "dark matter" of the proteome.

Jin was awarded the NIH DP2 New Innovator Award (declined).

Fiona leaves for medical school — best of luck, Fiona! The lab moves to Altos Labs in Redwood City, California.

Jin is named a Searle Scholar (declined).

Wan-Chen Li joins the lab as a postdoc.

Kaiyuan Zhu joins the lab as a postdoc.

Brad Wright and Fiona Yi join the lab.

The Chen lab is open at UT Southwestern!

Jin is awarded the First-Time, Tenure-Track Faculty Recruitment Award from CPRIT.

Jin is selected as an Endowed Scholar at UT Southwestern.