HomeDate: 2026-06-09
Dr. Yunching “Becky” Chen is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Biological Chemistry, Academia Sinica, and Deputy Editor in Chief of the Journal of Controlled Release. She received her Ph.D. in Pharmaceutical Sciences from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She then completed postdoctoral training in the Department of Radiation Oncology at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. After returning to Taiwan in 2013, she joined the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at National Tsing Hua University, where she advanced from Assistant Professor to Full Professor and served as Chair of the Institute of Biomedical Engineering.
Dr. Chen’s research focuses on a practical but challenging question: how can medicines be delivered to the right place in the body? Many treatments do not work well because drugs are broken down too quickly, cannot reach diseased tissues efficiently, or are blocked by the protective environment created by tumors and fibrotic tissues. Her laboratory develops nanomedicine and biomaterial based delivery systems that can carry nucleic acids, proteins, chemotherapy drugs, and immunotherapy agents. These tiny delivery vehicles act like navigation systems for medicine, helping treatments reach cancer or diseased tissues more precisely. Her work aims to improve therapies for cancer immunotherapy, liver cancer, pancreatic cancer, kidney fibrosis, and liver cirrhosis, with the long term goal of developing more precise and safer treatment strategies.
