About

Hi, I am a Bioinformatics and System Biology PhD student at UC San Diego under the supervision of Dr. Abraham Palmer. Currently, my research focuses on investigating the effects of complex variants (such as tandem repeats and structural variants) on addiction-related behaviors.

Before joining my PhD program, I worked with Dr. Abraham Palmer for 2.5 years on developing and optimizing low-coverage whole-genome sequencing genotyping pipelines, in support of the NIDA Center of Excellence for Genetics, Genomics, and Epigenetics of Substance Use Disorders in Outbred Rats.

I also worked with Dr. Shi Huang on human micriobiome meta-analysis where I mainly focused on microbiome SNVs calling pipeline development and machine learning application on metagenomics.

Publications

Chen, D., Chitre, A. S., Nguyen, K. H., Cohen, K. A., Peng, B. F., Ziegler, K. S., Okamoto, F., Lin, B., Johnson, B. B., Sanches, T. M., Cheng, R., Polesskaya, O., & Palmer, A. A. A cost-effective, high-throughput, highly accurate genotyping method for outbred populations. G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics (2025).

Jiang, S.*, Chen, D.*, Ma, C., Liu, H., Huang, S., Zhang J. Establishing a novel inflammatory bowel disease predictive model based on gene markers identified from single nucleotide mutation of intestinal microbiota. iMeta (2022).

Ma, C.*, Zhang, C.*, Chen, D.*, Jiang, S., Shen, S., Huo, D., Huang, S., Zhai, Q., Zhang J. Probiotic consumption influences universal adaptive mutations in indigenous human and mouse gut microbiota. Communications Biology (2021).