Recently, after the review, selection, and voting by the professional committee of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), Hui Chen, a jointly trained student in the research group led by LeiLi, a Junior Principal Investigator at the Institute of Systems and Physical Biology of Shenzhen Bay Laboratory（SZBL）, won the "ASHG Trainee Research Excellence Award Semifinalist" in 2024 and gave an oral presentation.

At the just-concluded 75th Annual Meeting of the American Society of Human Genetics, Hui Chen, a student from the Institute of Systems and Physical Biology of SZBL, won the "ASHG Trainee Research Excellence Award Semifinalist" in 2024 and gave an oral thematic report. Her research emphasized the important role of intronic polyadenylation in identifying new cancer susceptibility genes, providing new insights into the etiology of human genetic diseases.

The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) was established in 1948. The ASHG Annual Meeting is the largest and most influential conference on human genetics and genomics in the world, with more than 8,000 scholars from all over the world attending every year. The ASHG Trainee Research Excellence Award is set up to recognize the most innovative researchers in human genetics research at the doctoral and postdoctoral levels. The competition was particularly fierce this year. Among more than 800 applicants, no more than 30 doctoral students could enter the semifinalist list. This is also the first time that a student from SZBL has been nominated for this award.

Personal Profile

Hui Chen is a jointly trained doctoral candidate of SZBL and the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) in Barcelona. She is from the research group led by Lei Li and mainly focuses on the functional interpretation of human non-coding risk variants, especially the molecular mechanisms by which transcriptional and post-transcriptional modification regulations lead to complex diseases.