The Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology announces the appointment of Liam Chen to our faculty as an associate professor and Director of Neuropathology effective August 31. Chen comes to us from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where in addition to neuropathology clinical service he conducted research on the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative disorders and CNS tumors.

Chen earned his M.D. from Shandong Medical University in China and his Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in Canada. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Pathology, Harvard Medical School and completed Anatomic Pathology/Neuropathology training at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Boston Children's Hospital and a Molecular Genetic Pathology fellowship at Harvard Medical School. He joined the Hopkins pathology faculty in 2012.

Chen received the AFTD Susan Marcus Memorial Fund Clinical Research Award in 2018 which he used to investigate extraneous RNA called cryptic exons in postmortem frontotemporal dementia (FTD) brain tissue as potential biomarkers for drug development

Sun M, Bell W, LaClair KD, Ling JP, Han H, Kageyama Y, Pletnikova O, Troncoso JC, Wong PC and Chen LL. Cryptic exon incorporation occurs in Alzheimer's brain lacking TDP-43 inclusion but exhibiting nuclear clearance of TDP-43. Acta Neuropathol. 2017;133(6):923-931. doi:10.1007/s00401-017-1701-2

Donde A, Wong PC, Chen LL. Challenges and advances in gene therapy approaches for neurodegenerative disorders. Curr Gene Ther. 2017;17(3):187-193. doi:10.2174/1566523217666171013124150

Donde A, Sun M, Ling JP, Braunstein KE, Pang B, Wen X, Cheng X, Chen L and Wong PC. Splicing repression is a major function of TDP-43 in motor neurons. Acta Neuropathologica. 2019; 138 (11):813–826. doi: 10.1007/s00401-019-02042-8

Cho SM, Geocadin RG, Caturegli G, Chan V, White B, Dodd-O J, Kim B-O, Sussman M, Choi C-W, Whitman G, Chen LL. Understanding characteristics of acute brain injury in adult extracorporeal membrane oxygenation: An autopsy study. Crit Care Med. 2020;48(6):e532-e536. doi:10.1097/CCM.0000000000004289