New Kid on the Block
James Chen was raised by mathematicians who taught him at an early age to program computers and to think analytically. “Everything had to be formulated. Instead of speaking in natural language, we sometimes spoke in formulae at home,” Chen says with a laugh. No surprise, then, that Chen, assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology at the Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), became an expert in electron microscopy data analysis.
Physics appealed to him as a college student in China, but as a graduate student at Florida State University, he found himself lured into biophysics. He began working with Michael Chapman, now also at OHSU, on an X-ray crystallography project to perform structure refinement in real space — against the electron density map — rather than in reciprocal space ...
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