Chia-Yen Chen, Sc.D. is a postdoctoral research fellow in both the Analytic and Translational Genetics Unit (ATGU) and the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit (PNGU) at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also affiliated with the Broad institute of MIT and Harvard. Mentored by Jordan Smoller, M.D., Sc.D. and Benjamin Neale, Ph.D., Dr. Chen’s research interest lies in understanding the genetic basis of psychiatric disorders, especially posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other stress-related disorders, through developing novel statistical genetics methods and analyzing large-scale genomic data. Dr. Chen developed novel methods for Mendelian randomization, polygenic risk prediction models, and ancestry inference. He is also the lead analyst for the genomic analyses in the Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers (Army STARRS), a member of Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (PGC) PTSD working group and SCZ working group, and a member of International Cohort Collection for Bipolar Disorder.
Dr. Chen earned a BSc in Life Science in 2004 and a MSc in Epidemiology in 2006 from National Taiwan University. He earned a Sc.M. in Biostatistics in 2012 and a Sc.D. in Epidemiology in 2013 from the Harvard School of Public Health. His doctoral advisor was Alkes L. Price, Ph.D.
