Dr. Jane-Jane Chen

Jane-Jane Chen has been a principal research scientist and internationally recognized authority in the field of blood cell development at MIT for 45 years.

During her MIT career, Chen produced potent biochemistry research, working with heme-regulated eIF2 alpha kinase (which was discovered as the heme-regulated inhibitor of translation, HRI) and regulation of gene expression at translation relating to anemia, including:

(*) cloning of the HRI cDNA, enabling groundbreaking new discoveries of HRI in the erythroid system and, notably, most recently in the brain neuronal system upon mitochondrial stress and in cancers;
(*) elucidating the biochemistry of heme-regulation of HRI;
(*) generating universal HRI knockout mice as a valuable research tool to study HRI’s functions in vivo in the setting of the whole animal; and
(*) establishing HRI as a master translation regulator for erythropoiesis under stress and diseases.

During her time at MIT and IMES, she has worked with many renowned scientists, including Gehrke and London, professor of biology at MIT, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS), founding director of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), and a recognized expert in molecular regulation of hemoglobin synthesis. She says that she is also in debt to the colleagues and collaborators at HMS and Children’s Hospital Boston for their scientific interests and support at the time when her research branched into the field of hematology, far different from her expertise in biochemistry. All of them are HST-educated physician scientists, including Stuart H. Orkin, Nancy C. Andrews, Mark D. Fleming, and Vijay G. Sankaran.