This post was updated Jan. 28 at 10:58 p.m.

When Dr. Irene Chen wraps up her day teaching courses and leading research, her work isn’t finished – she then heads back to the Hill, where she is an Olympic Hall faculty in residence.

Chen, a physician-scientist and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering, said she has pursued broad interests from an early age. In high school, Chen immersed herself in cancer research at UC San Diego, and she went on to study chemistry at Harvard University – drawn by the broad foundation chemistry offers for other fields such as biology and physics, she said.

Chen later enrolled in a joint M.D.-Ph.D. program at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which she said aligned with her immediate interests in both research and biomedical fields. After exploring membrane biophysics during the program, she ultimately decided to focus on research rather than medicine by pursuing a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, she added.

“I want to learn as much as possible,” Chen said. “Looking back on it, if I had thought about it more deeply and tried to get a better sense of what physicians actually do on the day-to-day, then I probably could have figured out my ultimate path a little bit earlier.”

Chen taught at UC Santa Barbara before joining as a professor at UCLA in 2020, she said. She currently teaches three courses, including a Fiat Lux on the scientific origins of life, she added.

“I got into this (teaching) through the research side, but I’ve also found that it’s really fun to interact with students – and not just graduate students, but also undergrads,” Chen said. “They bring a lot of fresh ideas and energy and make connections that I wouldn’t make, so I think that’s been really rewarding.”

Chen is also the principal investigator of her lab at UCLA, which runs projects on understanding both the beginnings of life and antimicrobial resistance.

One project at the Chen lab focuses on engineering phages – viruses that infect bacteria – to combat antimicrobial resistance and potential future outbreaks, Chen said.

The current phage therapy process is slow, but Chen said her lab aims to accelerate it and make phage treatment more applicable to acute infections by genetically engineering phages to target both broad and specific ranges of bacteria. The lab is also working to eliminate undesirable phage properties, such as their rapidly evolving, exponentially self-replicating nature, she added.

“To me, what’s exciting about this is that I feel like we do have a handle on how to get these phages under control and make them more like biological drugs rather than biological self-replicating entities,” Chen said.

Steven Yang, a chemical engineering doctoral student in the Chen lab, said he successfully engineered a single phage to target a variety of gram-negative bacteria. This “golden bullet” solution uses phages to deliver toxic drugs to the bacteria and improves efficacy by about 100 times, he added.

“In the United States, it’s definitely the forerunner in the engineered phage field. And especially in terms of drug delivery, nobody has done the work that she’s done before,” Yang said. “The amount of innovation and the amount of work – in terms of the amount of characterization in the preclinical sense – is unparalleled.”

Another project in Chen’s lab examines the protocell – a hypothetical precursor to modern cells – and has found that membranes cause RNA to fold into more compact states, boosting its evolutionary rate, Chen said.

Understanding how protocells may have given rise to modern self-replicating cells could  allow people to design self-replicating systems in the future that degrade toxins in the environment or produce chemicals, Chen said.

“The protocell project stimulates that children’s curiosity of, ‘How did life start? How could you build something like this?’” Chen said. “That’s a very fundamental question.”

Chen said she believes work on phage technology in academia is especially important because there is a lack of monetary incentive for the private sector to design new antimicrobials.

“I’ve always been thinking for this project, ‘How can we make sure that our future generations don’t have to go back to the pre-antibiotic era, which was pretty scary?’” Chen said. “We have to keep pushing this forward because microbes are continuously evolving much faster than humans can evolve, so we have to keep up with them with our science.”

Reflecting on her background, Chen said her medical training enables her to understand clinical literature and communicate with physicians about clinical insights relevant to the lab’s work.

Yang said Chen offers guidance to students during the research process and gives them opportunities to explore various research directions.

“One thing I learned from her is, probably, how to deal with very complex issues, because … this school is a very big system, and we always run into different challenges that can’t be solved immediately,” Yang said. “(Irene) can handle these situations in a delicate way – that she can really take things slowly, figure out what’s the best approach and then address these issues.”

Yang said he was Chen’s first graduate student at UCLA and joined in 2020 after visiting her lab in Santa Barbara at the time.

“She actually picked me up from the hotel to visit her lab, and I feel like she’s very personable,” Yang said. “A lot of PIs probably won’t do that in a serious and formal school visiting process, so I really appreciated it.”

Chen also closely engages with students as faculty in residence at Olympic Hall, where she lives with her husband and two children, she said.

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Chen said she became a faculty in residence to learn more about the UCLA community. Through the role, she has gained a better understanding of the student body and resources available at UCLA – and what the walk from the Hill to Boelter Hall feels like at 8 a.m., she added.

Chen also said she aims to support UCLA’s mission by hosting events and interacting with students as faculty in residence. She added that she has gained an appreciation for the energy and maturity of the Hill’s resident assistants.

“It’s been really inspiring for me to see these very young people who take on that role of responsibility,” Chen said. “I don’t think I could have done it when I was in college.”

Every Olympic Hall RA collaborates with Chen to plan an event, said Rita Kamal, one of the building’s RAs. Kamal, a third-year microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics student, said she previously helped Chen host a pre-med coffee chat event with Chen’s sister, an endocrinologist.

Chen has also hosted graduate school panels, voter registration drives and lab tours, Kamal said.

Chen is supportive and responsible while planning events, and she is committed to hosting diverse programs with resources for students’ current and future success, Kamal said.

“Just our first quarter, she’s planned three events, which goes above and beyond her expectations in Olympic Hall,” Kamal said. “She wants to make sure all students succeed in Olympic and … on the Hill.”