Brian Y. Chen

I am an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering within the P. C. Rossin College of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Lehigh University. My research focuses primarily on structural bioinformatics.  In the lab, our current research is focused on creating software that can reveal the structural mechanisms that control specificity in molecular recognition.  We work in topics as ranging from algorithms for constructive solid geometry to statistics for geometric analysis to novel intuitive interfaces for scientific software, and we apply these tools to better understand specific protein families of interest.

I was a postdoctoral research scientist at Barry Honig's Lab at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, and the Center for Computational Biology and Bioinformatics at Columbia University. At Columbia, I gained considerable exposure to research in structural biology, biophysics, and protein crystallography.

I earned a Ph.D. from Rice University's Department of Computer Science for my work on protein function annotation. My advisor was Dr. Lydia Kavraki. While at Rice, I had the pleasure to learn quite a bit about structural bioinformatics, robotics, graphics, and distributed systems.

I received a B.A. in Mathematics and a B.A. in Computer Science from Rutgers College atRutgers University, the State University of New Jersey, in 2000. While at Rutgers, I had the opportunity to do a summer project with János Komlós, and some signal processing with William Craelius.