Our general interests are mainly in the development of advanced computational methods and their applications to the study of biomolecules and biomaterials. These methods include more accurate protein force fields at atomistic and coarse-grained levels, as well as various enhanced sampling and efficient GPU-enabled algorithms. A particular emphasis has been on understanding how intrinsical disorder of proteins mediates function and how such functional mechanisms may be altered in human diseases. Our research has been supported by NSF, NIH and various local and state funding agencies.

Current Research
Research in the Chen lab currently focuses on five key areas:

1. Advanced sampling techniques and multi-scale protein models
2. Intrinsically disordered proteins: structure, function and disease
3. Multi-scale simulation of biomolecular condensates and protein aggregation
4. Gating and regulation of ion channel proteins
5. Statistical learning and prediction of protein function