Zsu-Zsu Chen, MD, MPH

Zsu-Zsu Chen, MD, MPH, is an endocrinologist and researcher studying diabetes and subsequent cardiometabolic complications through the lens of the human ‘circulatome.’ She leverages biostatistics and computational biology to identify circulating small molecules, also known as metabolites, and proteins associated with diabetes development in large population cohorts. These biomarker will help to better quantify disease risk and—with genetic integration—highlight pathways that cause disease. She has additional interests in chemically identifying unknown metabolites which are novel small molecules that have not been previously studied. Her work is NIH-funded and aimed at understanding why people have different diabetes risk and different responses to the same treatment. With her research collaborators, she also has a goal to increase the generalizability of these identified biomarkers to most human populations across the full life span. Dr. Chen is an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.