Yufeng Shen is an associate professor of systems biology and biomedical informatics at Columbia University. He received his B.S. in biochemistry and molecular biology from Peking University and his Ph.D. in computational biology from Baylor College of Medicine. At Baylor, Shen led the analysis of the first human genome sequenced by next-generation technologies.

Shen currently directs National Institutes of Health–funded research programs that integrate genomics data to predict consequences of genetic variation using statistical and computational methods and to apply genomics and computational biology in genetic studies of human diseases. His group developed CANOES (Backenroth et al., Nucleic Acids Res., 2014), a method to identify rare copy number variants from exome sequencing data. They also discovered that epigenomic patterns under normal conditions are associated with risk genes of developmental disorders (Han et al., Nat. Commun., 2018). In addition, his research led to the discovery of a number of novel risk genes of common birth defects such as congenital heart disease (Homsy et al., Science, 2015) and congenital diaphragmatic hernia (Qi et al., PLoS Genetics, 2018).