Dr. Shuibing Chen is the Kilts Family Professor and the Director of the Diabetes Program in the Department of Surgery at Weill Cornell Medicine. She received my B.S. and M.S. in Chemistry from Tsinghua University in China. Then, she pursued my PhD under the advisement of Dr. Peter G. Schultz at the Scripps Research Institute. After graduation, she joined Dr. Doug Melton’s laboratory at Harvard University to study the directed differentiation of human embryonic stem cells toward pancreatic lineage.
The major research interest in the Chen Laboratory focuses on human pluripotent stem cell-derived organoids for disease modeling and drug screening. One major focus of the lab is to study pancreatic beta cell dysfunction in type 1 and 2 diabetes. They used CRISPR-based gene editing approach to precisely knock out genes or knock-in single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) associated with type 1 or type 2 diabetes. The disease modeling platform will be adapted to high throughput format to perform drug discovery and identify gene/allele-specific drugs. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Chen created a panel of hPSC-derived cells/organoids to study SARS-CoV-2 infection. Part of these work has been published on Nature, Cell Stem Cells, Cell Metabolism, Circulation Research, etc. She has received many awards including New York Stem Cell Foundation Robertson Investigator, American Diabetes Association (ADA) Innovative Award, NIH Director’s New Innovator Award, and ISSCR Dr. Susan Lim Award for Outstanding Young Investigator, etc.