Bio
Serena Chen is a research scientist in the Biostatistics and Biomedical Informatics Group at ORNL. Her current research focuses on structure characterization of biological systems through machine learning and molecular simulations. She has a broad background in biochemistry, with specific training and expertise in computational method development for modeling protein sequence, structure, and dynamics. She is co-leading a crosscutting initiative on enzyme engineering in the ORNL Directed Research and Development Program where she is integrating machine learning models and molecular simulations for generating new enzymes that present novel or improved function.
Before joining ORNL, Serena was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Healthcare and Life Sciences Division at IBM Research. Her postdoc research was in the field of nanomedicine where she used molecular modeling and Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations to study bio-nanomaterial interactions in application for nanomaterial design.
She received her Ph. D. in Biochemistry from the University of Texas at Austin, where she developed numerical algorithms for molecular switch prediction, protein stability and conformational transition reactions using a combination of knowledge-based scoring functions, mathematical programming and MD simulations.