On Dec. 1, 2025, Associate Professor Ming Chen, PhD, was promoted to associate professor with tenure. He joined Duke’s Department of Pathology in September 2018, focusing on modeling human cancer in mice, studying mechanisms of metastasis, and translating new insights into therapies to combat cancer. His team has recently expanded the scope of its studies to explore how lipid metabolism supports different aspects of cancer (Chen J et al., Oncogene, 2025) and the potential vulnerabilities associated with increased lipid metabolism (Wang ME et al., J Clin Invest, 2023).
Chen has authored 43 peer-reviewed articles, with 19 as first or senior author, in leading journals such as Nature Genetics, Cancer Discovery, Nature Communications, and Journal of Clinical Investigation. Chen has received numerous awards, including a 2024 Duke Science and Technology Spark Seed Grant Award; an Early Career Research Achievement Award from the Duke Department of Pathology; a 2022 Borden Scholar Award from the Duke University School of Medicine; two Duke Cancer Institute Pilot Project Awards; a 2021 Mike Slive Foundation Pilot Grant Award; and a 2020 Department of Defense (DoD) PCRP Idea Development Award. He currently is supported by three RO1s as principal investigator and one DoD grant as co-investigator.
Chen has also devoted considerable effort to teaching, mentoring, educational activities, and institutional service, both within Duke and beyond its walls. In the past seven years, Chen has mentored six postdoctoral fellows, two graduate students (one graduated in 2023, the other in 2024), two undergraduate students, eight rotating graduate students, and three visiting scholars.