About

My background

I have a typical Chinese name (Xi Chen, 陈曦). I did my BSc in Experimental Medicine at Peking University Health Science Centre in Beijing, where I became interested in all the techniques used in biochemistry and molecular biology. After graduation, I joined Andy Sharrocks’ lab at the University of Manchester as a PhD student, studying the DNA binding specificity of different Forkhead transcription factors. During this period, I discovered an evolutionarily conserved transcription factor complex that regulates G2/M cell cycle transition.

After my PhD, I joined Sarah Teichmann’s group at the EBI as a postdoc to investigate T helper cell 2 (Th2) differentiation from an epigenetic point of view. In 2016, the Teichmann lab moved to the Sanger Institute, and I became a Senior Staff Scientist in the lab. During that period, I was mainly working on techniques to interrogate the gene expression and epigenetic profiles at the single cell level. I developed a simple and robust way of performing scATAC-seq so that everybody can easily investigate chromatin accessibility at the single cell level.

In 2019, I joined the Department of Biology at SUSTech, Shenzhen, China as an Assistant Professor. My lab study transcriptional regulation in cell fate decision and memory. You can check my publications using my ORCID: 0000-0003-2648-3146.

About this website

I write stuff here to explain things that I’m trying to understand for my own education, mostly about next generation sequencing, bioinformatics, epigenetics and molecular biology. The site is created using Hugo with the Gokarna theme and hosted on GitHub page.