Bryan Chen
CV

Microbiology · UC San Diego · Class of 2029

Bryan Chen

Bench microbiology now. The biology of neural interfaces next.

Microbiology major at UC San Diego. In summer 2026, I isolated and characterized extracellular vesicles at National Taiwan University and supplied them to the lab's neuronal cell team. Before that, three seasons of iGEM as a member, a team leader, and an instructor.

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Fig. 1Nanoparticle tracking, simulated live. A slow flow carries vesicles right to left through the laser sheet. Each one is tracked frame by frame, the flow is subtracted, and the jitter left over gives its size: smaller vesicles jitter faster. Mode: about 100 nm.

01

Research

July to August 2026

Taipei, Taiwan

Full time, six weeks

Undergraduate Research Intern, Shen Lab

National Taiwan University · PI: Prof. Shen Tang-Long

I isolated extracellular vesicles from Cordyceps liquid culture for the lab's cell regeneration program, and supplied characterized vesicle preparations to its neuronal cell team.

  1. 01

    Culture

    Peptone and yeast extract broth, autoclaved. Mycelium grown in submerged culture.

  2. 02

    Clear

    Harvested by filtration and low-speed clearing spins.

  3. 03

    Sterilize

    0.22 µm sterile filtration.

  4. 04

    Concentrate

    Differential ultracentrifugation with PBS washes between spins. Trained on tangential flow filtration (TFF) as the alternative route.

  5. 05

    Characterize

    Nanoparticle tracking analysis for size and concentration. Protein quantification.

  6. 06

    Bank

    Aliquots stored at −80 °C for downstream assays.

Fig. 2The isolation pipeline I ran end to end, from flask to freezer.
  • Characterized particle size and concentration by NTA.
  • Also grew Cordyceps in solid-state culture on rice, then freeze-dried it on the lab's lyophilizer and milled it to powder.

2023 to 2025

Taiwan

High school division

Three seasons of iGEM: member, leader, instructor

International Genetically Engineered Machine competition

  1. 2025

    Instructor and Mentor, WIST iGEM

    Went back to my high school to mentor its team through experimental design, slides and the wiki. Taught plasmid construction, Golden Gate assembly, BioBrick cloning, and research ethics and safety. The team's project, Riceguard, is a cell-free biosensor that makes rice-water extract glow when it contains arsenic, designed to be freeze-dried onto paper strips.

    • Silver Medal

    Read the project wiki

  2. 2024

    Student Leader, GEMS-Taiwan

    One of several student leaders of a 28-member team. We built a dengue-control system from recombinant biolarvicidal toxins, a beetroot-peel mosquito attractant, and Taiwan's first sticky ovitrap. I worked across wet lab, dry lab and human practices: PCR, gel electrophoresis, bacterial culture, literature review and science communication.

    • Grand Prize, High School
    • Gold Medal
    • Best New Basic Part
    • Best Wiki
    • Best Promotion Video

    Read the project wiki

  3. 2023

    Member, WIST iGEM

    Joined my school's first iGEM team and worked across wet lab, dry lab and human practices. The team designed a Bacillus subtilis strain that makes AiiA, an enzyme that breaks down the quorum-sensing signal Dickeya bacteria use to trigger soft rot in orchids.

    • Best Education, nominated

    See the team's credits page

02

Things I've built

Tools for EV and microbiology data, a cloning game from teaching, and one physics project. Built with Claude as a coding partner, like the Notebook: I picked each problem, set what it had to do, and tested the results; Claude wrote most of the code.

VesiScope's sample view for a synthetic demo prep: a green QC pass badge and four passing checks above a chart where the NTA and DLS size curves both peak between 100 and 110 nanometres.
Fig. 3VesiScope on a synthetic demo sample, not lab data: four QC checks across the top, NTA and DLS size distributions overlaid below.

EV data · Web app

VesiScope

Quality control for extracellular vesicle size data, designed around preps like the ones in Fig. 2. Load NTA or DLS size distributions as a simple CSV (method, size and value per row) and get D10, D50 and D90, four automatic QC flags (polydispersity, concentration in the linear range, mode in the small-EV window, and DLS against NTA agreement), and side-by-side sample comparison. It does not read raw instrument files yet.

  • 4 automatic QC checks on every sample
  • 22 of 22 automated tests pass
  • Tested on synthetic data only so far
  • Built with Claude

Private build · demo on request

Microbiology · Web tool

Growth Curve Analyzer

Turns a plate reader's growth-curve export into numbers. Load the CSV, mark blank wells and group replicates. For every well it finds the steepest straight stretch of log OD and reports growth rate, doubling time, lag time, maximum OD and area under the curve, with plots and a CSV export. Runs in your browser; the demo plate is synthetic.

  • Built with Claude
Try it on the demo plate

Teaching · Browser game

LIGATE

A plasmid-design game that came out of teaching cloning to high school iGEM students. Thirty briefs across five acts, free, no account. The simulator treats the plasmid as a circle, terminators weaken transcription instead of stopping it, ribosomes only bind where a site sits in front of a start codon, and every protein you make costs the cell growth.

  • Built with Claude
Play LIGATE

General relativity · Rendering

A Kerr black hole, traced from the metric up

A renderer that follows light through the curved spacetime around a spinning black hole instead of faking it. Each physical claim is checked against a closed-form result or an independent calculation, and 14 of 14 validation gates pass. The clip uses spin 0.6 with Doppler and gravitational shifts switched off, as in the film Interstellar, so the shadow and photon ring are easy to see.

  • Built with Claude

Private build · demo on request

More in the Notebook: side projects made with Claude and Codex

03

Methods

What I can run at the bench, grouped the way a methods section would group it.

Extracellular vesicles

Summer 2026

  • Differential ultracentrifugation
  • Tangential flow filtration (TFF), training
  • Nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA)
  • 0.22 µm sterile filtration
  • Protein quantification
  • −80 °C sample banking and aliquoting

Microbiology

  • Aseptic technique
  • Media preparation and autoclaving
  • Strain maintenance and subculturing
  • Submerged fungal culture
  • Solid-state fungal culture
  • Lyophilization
  • Bacterial culture

Molecular biology

  • PCR
  • Gel electrophoresis
  • Plasmid construction
  • Golden Gate assembly
  • BioBrick-based cloning
  • Protocol optimization

Communication

  • Scientific writing
  • Literature review
  • Presentations
  • Wiki development
  • Teaching lab skills

Languages · Mandarin (native), English (fluent)

04

About

Bryan Chen in a beige striped shirt, head and shoulders.
Plate 1Bryan (Yu-Tse) Chen 陳宇澤, 2026.

I grew up in Taiwan and got into microbiology through iGEM, where I went from team member to team leader to instructor in three seasons. I came to UC San Diego for microbiology.

What I want to work on is the place where living tissue meets an implant. Neural interfaces lose signal over time as the body walls them off: the foreign-body response and glial scarring. I'm interested in the biology of that problem, and in delivery tools like engineered AAV capsids and extracellular vesicles, which is part of why my summer 2026 EV work mattered to me.

Education

University of California, San Diego

Expected June 2029

B.S. Microbiology, John Muir College. Relevant coursework: Genetics (BICD 100), General Chemistry II and III (CHEM 6B, 6C), Mechanics (PHYS 1A), Data Analysis and Design for Biology (BILD 5).

Washington International School, Taichung

High school

Where the iGEM journey started: I joined the school's first team, then came back to instruct. AP Scholar with Honor.

05

Get in touch.

I'm happy to talk about microbiology, extracellular vesicles, and the biology of neural interfaces. Email is the fastest way to reach me.

brc035 at ucsd.edu

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