Rate My Professor Zheng-Yi Chen

Zheng-Yi Chen, D.Phil., serves as Associate Professor of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery at Harvard Medical School. He is also Associate Scientist in the Eaton-Peabody Laboratories at Mass Eye and Ear and holds the Ines and Fredrick Yeatts Chair in Otolaryngology at Mass Eye and Ear. He earned his D.Phil. from Oxford University and completed postdoctoral training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Chen’s laboratory focuses on the functional genomics of hearing, inner ear hair cell regeneration, mechanisms and treatments for age-related and noise-induced hearing loss, and gene therapy for hereditary deafness. His research includes cloning and characterizing deafness genes, demonstrating direct protein delivery into the mammalian inner ear, and applying CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing to treat genetic hearing loss in animal models. The laboratory has identified the retinoblastoma gene (Rb1) as key in hair cell development and has shown that reprogramming factors can induce proliferation and regeneration of functional hair cells in adult and aged mammalian inner ears. Additional work has explored overexpression of the ISL1 gene for protection against age-related and noise-induced hearing loss and the development of AAV-based gene therapies. Dr. Chen’s long-term goals center on identifying genes and pathways governing inner ear development, function, and disease to advance treatments for various forms of hearing loss in humans.