Brian Y. Chen

Dr. Brian Y. Chen is an Associate Professor and Doctoral Program Director in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Lehigh University. His research focuses on bioinformatics, structural biology, and machine learning applications in computational biology. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University and B.A. degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from Rutgers University.

Dr. Chen's work emphasizes developing algorithms to analyze protein structures, protein-protein interactions, and ligand binding mechanisms. He has contributed to tools like DeepVASP-S and MechPPI, which explain molecular interactions and predict binding specificity. His recent projects include Alzheimer’s disease diagnosis using multimodal data and containerization frameworks for bioinformatics software.

He previously served as a postdoctoral researcher in Barry Honig's Lab at Columbia University, where he contributed to the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. His research spans structural bioinformatics, computational methods for protein function prediction, and interdisciplinary applications in medicine and materials science.

Key achievements include a nomination for Outstanding Mentorship (2017) and collaborative projects funded by the Army Research Lab and Lehigh University. His lab explores cutting-edge AI techniques for biomedical problems, including interpretable machine learning models and scalable bioinformatics pipelines.