Liang Chen

Liang Chen is a Professor of Quantitative and Computational Biology at the University of Southern California. He leads research efforts in developing advanced statistical and computational frameworks to unravel gene expression regulation mechanisms in eukaryotes, with a focus on post-transcriptional processes and their implications in human diseases.

Research Emphasis:

• Alternative pre-mRNA splicing as a driver of proteomic diversity and disease
• Advanced RNA-seq data analysis and transcriptome comparison
• Quantitative trait locus mapping (eQTL, NMD-QTL)
• Network modeling of splicing regulation

Notable Software Contributions: Development of BCseq (single-cell RNA quantification), CellTICS (explainable AI for cell-type identification), and WemIQ (isoform quantification).

Current Research Directions: Integrating multi-omics data to study splicing-phenotype relationships, leveraging interpretable machine learning for personalized medicine, and exploring evolutionary conservation of gene regulatory mechanisms.

Education:

• Ph.D. in Computational Biology, Yale University (2006)
• B.S. in Bioinformatics, Tsinghua University (2001)

Ph.D. Advisees: Wei Jiang, Zheyu Li, Qingyang Yin, and Xinyu (Brian) Guo.