Early-career faculty identified as field’s most promising scholars
Four University of Chicago faculty members have earned prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships, awarded to early-career scholars whose achievements and potential mark them as the next scientific leaders.
They include a biologist seeking to understand how the brain makes decisions; a geologist exploring the composition of ancient oceans; a chemist understanding and inventing new catalysts; and a statistician developing tools that could help lead to personalized disease diagnosis.
Mengjie Chen, an assistant professor in the Department of Human Genetics, is a computational biologist and statistician whose research bridges statistical methodological advances and biomedical applications. She and her group develop computational methods and open-source tools to address challenges posed by high-throughput genomics technologies for data analysis and interpretation. The ultimate goal is to develop methods that can integrate genomic features into the prediction of clinical outcomes, which will potentially shed new light on personalized disease diagnosis and prognosis.