Can Chen

Can Chen is an Assistant Professor in the School of Data Science and Society at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, with adjunct appointments in the Department of Mathematics (College of Arts & Sciences) and the Department of Biostatistics (Gillings School of Global Public Health). He holds core faculty status in the Carolina Health Informatics Program and is affiliated with the Computational Medicine Program and Carolina Center for Interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics.

Education: B.S. in Mathematics (UC Irvine, 2016), M.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering (UMichigan, 2020), Ph.D. in Applied & Interdisciplinary Mathematics (UMichigan, 2021), followed by a postdoc at Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School (2021–2023).

Research interests span control theory, network science, tensor algebra, numerical analysis, machine learning, computational biology, and hypergraph learning. Notable contributions include theoretical frameworks for ecological systems stability, tensor-based dynamical systems, and hypergraph learning applied to genome-scale metabolic networks.

Recent work includes a Physics Reports review on ecological stability, a Springer book on tensor algebra, and a Nature Communications paper introducing CHESHIRE for metabolic network analysis. His lab focuses on developing computational tools for systems biology and translational medicine.

Key collaborations involve proteogenomic approaches to cancer biomarker discovery, E3 ligase-based targeted therapy, and signal transduction pathways in oncology. He currently oversees research on protein degradation mechanisms, immune-oncology, and systems-driven drug development.