Approved by the NSRRC BoT, Dr. Chun-Jung Chen has been officially appointed as the Deputy Director of NSRRC, with effect from August 1, 2018.
Dr. Chen received his PhD degree in Department of Crystallography from University of Pittsburgh in 1999. He then took up the postdoctoral fellow position at the Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, University of Georgia in 1999 - 2000. In 2004 he was recruited to the NSRRC as an Associate Scientist in Life Science Group, and was promoted to a Scientist in 2011. He is also an adjunct professor in the Department of Physics, National Tsing Hua University and in the Department of Biotechnology and Bioindustry Sciences, National Cheng Kung University.
Dr. Chen had held positions of the Group Leader in the Life Science Group, and the Head of the Scientific Research Division of NSRRC. His research fields range from synchrotron X-ray protein crystallography to molecular biophysics, structural biology and biochemistry. The major research interest aims to study the structure and functional relationship of various proteins and biological assemblies, including viruses, membrane proteins, protein-DNA/RNA interactions, enzymes, and other functional important proteins related to diseases and drug discovery by protein crystallography, X-ray absorption fine structure (XAFS), circular dichroism (CD) and small angle scattering (SAXS) using synchrotron X-ray from NSRRC and SPring-8. Recently, he also combines the X-ray methods with Cryo-EM as a complementary approach to measure the structures of biological macromolecular assemblies.
In addition, Dr. Chen has led many projects with domestic and international collaborators to study a number of proteins involved in diseases, medical application, drug design, venom toxicity, viral disease, catalysis, metabolism, etc. Another interest focuses on investigating the methodology for resolving the phase problem in protein crystallography, which applies to obtain the correct phases routinely and efficiently for structure determination of biological macromolecules.
Dr. Chen will continue to devote himself to scientific innovation and industrial applications, as well as endeavor to optimize the research facilities of TPS and TLS.