Welcome to the Chen Lab! We seek to understand the evolutionary processes that shape patterns of genetic variation over contemporary timescales. Much of our work combines genomics with extensive pedigree data from long-term demographic studies to answer questions in evolutionary biology and conservation genomics.
The Chen lab is recruiting motivated students and postdocs. Please get in touch if you’d like to join the team!
News
Jan 2026The Chen lab moved to the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Come join us in sunny California!
Dec 2025Our collaborative paper on scrub-jay pangenomes was published in Science.
Nov 2025Nancy traveled to McMurdo, Antarctica to do fieldwork for the long-term Weddell seal population study, where she learned a lot about seal biology and got to see penguins! 
Welcome to new NSF postdoc David Tian!
Sept 2025Check out our preprint on mapping fitness components and testing for trade-offs in the Florida Scrub-Jay.