Xi Chen did his BSc in Experimental Medicine in Peking University Health Science Centre in Beijing. Then he did his PhD in Andrew Sharrocks’ lab at the University of Manchester, where he studied the DNA binding specificity of different Forkhead transcription factors. After his PhD, Chen joined Sarah Teichmann’s group at the EMBL-EBI and Wellcome Sanger Institute as a postdoc to carry out single cell genomics research. In 2019, Chen joined the Department of Systems Biology in SUSTech as an Assistant Professor. His lab is mainly working on developing single-cell multi-omic techniques to study the mechanism of cell fate decisions.