Dr. Yong Chen is Professor of Biostatistics and Biomedical Informatics at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine and Founding Director of the PennCIL Lab and CHASE (Center for Health AI and Synthesis of Evidence), a Type I center with 30 trainees and staff. His work focuses on generating regulatory-grade real-world evidence using large-scale EHR and oncology datasets, including Flatiron, TriNetX, and Epic Cosmos. This work has been featured by The New York Times and TIME, and one study was selected as a Top 10 Clinical Research Achievement nationally by the Clinical Research Forum—one of the most prestigious honors in U.S. clinical research and the only RWE-based study recognized that year.

He develops AI and statistical frameworks to address data quality, bias calibration, and scalable evidence generation for drug repurposing, label expansion, and trial optimization across distributed research networks. Dr. Chen serves as a Commissioner for the Lancet Commission on Rare Diseases and is a group lead for the FDA–ASA workshops on negative controls and machine learning/AI in real-world data and evidence. He has published over 300 papers and is an elected Fellow of the ASA and the American College of Medical Informatics.