Zhijian "James" Chen is a Chinese-American biochemist and professor in the department of molecular biology at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.
14 Facts About Zhijian Chen
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Zhijian Chen is best known for his discovery of mechanisms by which nucleic acids trigger innate and autoimmune responses from the interior of a cell, work for which he received the 2019 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences.
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Zhijian Chen graduated from Anxi No 1 High School in 1981.
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Zhijian Chen attended Fujian Normal University and received an undergraduate degree in biology in 1985, before he won an overseas scholarship by getting first place in a biochemistry exam.
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Zhijian Chen used the scholarship to attend the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he got his Ph.
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Zhijian Chen then spent three years working as a senior scientist at biotech firm ProScript in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he developed assays that helped to identify and improve the cancer treatment Velcade.
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Zhijian Chen decided pursuing his research into ubiquitin would be more suited for work in academia and left ProScript in 1997 to start a lab at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
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Zhijian Chen currently holds the George L MacGregor Distinguished Chair in Biomedical Science and is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
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At his lab in UT-Southwestern, Zhijian Chen's group was able to show that ubiquitin marked proteins, marks that could be recognized by other proteins to create a "cascade" of signals.
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In 2012 Zhijian Chen was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Award in Molecular Biology, in 2018 the Lurie Prize in Biomedical Sciences from the National Institutes of Health for his discovery of cGAS and in 2018 the Ray Wu award from the Chinese Biological Investigators Society.
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In 2019 Zhijian Chen received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences for the discovery of the DNA-sensing enzyme cGAS and the pathways by which it activates innate immune responses.
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Zhijian Chen shared this prize with C Frank Bennett, Adrian R Krainer, Angelika Amon, and Xiaowei Zhuang.
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Zhijian Chen has received the Norman Hackerman Award in Chemical Research and the Edith and Peter O'Donnell Award in Science.
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Zhijian Chen was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2014.