Shi-An Chen
Scientist
2022 – present
Principal Investigator
Jin Chen
Principal Investigator, Altos Labs · Bay Area Institute of Science
Assistant Professor, Department of Pharmacology · Cecil H. and Ida Green Center · Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center · University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Jin trained as a physicist before crossing into biology — B.S. and M.S. in Applied Physics and Biomedical Engineering at Yale (2010), and a Ph.D. in Applied Physics (Biophysics) at Stanford in 2015 with Joseph Puglisi, developing single-molecule technologies for real-time studies of ribosome translation. He also holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering (Machine Learning) from Stanford. As a postdoctoral fellow at UCSF (2016–2020) with Jonathan Weissman, he systematically uncovered and characterized microproteins encoded by non-canonical open reading frames and co-developed CRISPRoff/on for inheritable epigenetic silencing. He started his independent lab as an Assistant Professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center in 2020 — an appointment he maintains today — and joined Altos Labs as a Principal Investigator in 2022 to lead his rejuvenation and cell-state biology program at scale.