Dr. Jingchun Chen is an assistant professor of Nevada Institute of Personalized Medicine (NIPM), working on the genetics of schizophrenia or other psychiatric disorders. Particularly, she focuses on the relationship between schizophrenia and immune system or microglia in the human brain, pursuing to identify reliable biomarkers for diagnosis and personalized treatment of schizophrenia. Dr. Chen’s research will provide better understanding on the onset of psychiatric disorders, especially schizophrenia.

Dr. Chen obtained her M.D. and Ph.D. from Tongji Medical University, one of the best medical schools in China. She was a physician in Pediatrics in China before she moved to the United States in 2000. In the earlier years of her career, she devoted herself on the genetic study of fragile X syndrome, and became one of the researchers who first applied PCR to the clinical screening and diagnosis of genetic disorders in China.

Since 2000, Dr. Chen has worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pharmacology/Toxicology at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), where she developed strong skills/techniques in a molecular biology laboratory, such as cell culture, DNA cloning, Western blot, PCR, flow cytometry, immunocytochemistry and ELISA.

Since 2007, Dr. Chen has focused on the genetic studies on schizophrenia and nicotine dependence in the Department of Psychiatry, VCU, where she not only strengthened experimental skills (genotyping, RT-PCR and RNA-sequencing), but also broadened extensive knowledge/experience in big data management, imputation, genome-wide association studies (GWASs), meta-analysis, polygenic analysis, RNA-Seq analysis and network/pathway analysis. Her studies have led to the discovery of several genes associated with schizophrenia/nicotine dependence, and have been published in peer-reviewed journals.