Dr. Shen is the Clinical Genetics Team Lead at the GSC. The Clinical Genetics team focuses on variant interpretation and prioritization from sequencing data of patients with rare, undiagnosed genetic disorders. By collaborating with clinicians, the team conducts research that helps identify causal variants and molecular mechanisms of rare genetic disorders with unknown etiology.
Dr. Shen obtained her PhD degree in Bioinformatics at University of Montreal, where she worked on phylogeny and in silico prediction of protein subcellular localization. She continued her research on protein function annotation as a postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley before she joined the GSC in 2012. At the GSC, Dr. Shen has contributed to several projects, including Finding of Rare Disease Genes (FORGE), BC Cancer's Personalized OncoGenomics (POG) program, the Pan Canadian Glioblastoma research program, and PRecision Oncology For Young peopLE (PROFYLE). Her research focuses on applying bioinformatics approaches to sequencing data analysis, particularly for inherited and sporadic genetic disorders including cancer.