Chenjie Shen received his doctoral training at Zhejiang University under the supervision of Xiaoming Li and co-advised by Hailan Hu. He is trained in pharmacology and system neuroscience. His Ph.D. research focused on elucidating the circuit mechanisms underlying neuropsychiatric disorders and identifying the mechanisms of action of psychedelic drugs in treating these conditions.

Driven by his interest in genetic engineering and genome editing, Shen joined the laboratory of Guoping Feng as a Simons postdoctoral fellow, co-advised by Feng Zhang at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, with a focus on developing genome editing-based therapeutic approaches for Rett syndrome. He has developed several MeCP2</i humanized mouse models and a non-human primate marmoset model that facilitate testing of human-specific genome editors in vivo and explored the idea of using base editing to restore MeCP2 expression under its endogenous regulation. As a SFARI bridge to Independence Fellow, his aim is to expand the toolkit to develop clinically applicable therapies for RTT and potential other monogenic ASDs, that are more efficient, temporally restricted, and capable of penetrating the large brain.