Biography
Dr Chen completed his Master’s degree at the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China in 2015. His work focused on the effects of estrogen and follicle stimulated hormone on cardiovascular disease and breast cancer. His research helped postmenopausal women to find the window of time for hormone replacement treatment in cardiovascular disease prevention.
He then completed his PhD research at The Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute and The University of New South Wales in 2019 under the supervision of Professor Roland Stocker. During his PhD, Dr Chen generated a new in vivo model of bilirubin deficiency. He used this model to demonstrate, for the first time, that bilirubin acts as an in vivo antioxidant.
As a post-doc in the Arterial Inflammation and Redox Biology Group supervised by Professor Stocker at the Heart Research Institute, Dr Chen is currently completing mechanistic work on the role of bilirubin in atherosclerotic plaque stability and metabolic disease. His work aims at helping to resolve a long known but little understood fact, i.e., that people with low bilirubin have an increased risk of developing cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, whereas people with modestly elevated bilirubin are protected from these diseases.