City of Hope investigator Yuan Chen, Ph.D., professor in the Division of Immunology, will serve as a member of the Macromolecular Structure and Function study section for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) beginning in July. Study section members are established experts in a particular field who participate in peer review by evaluating research grants submitted to the NIH. Chen will serve a four-year term on the panel.

Chen, who has worked at City of Hope since 1994, is interested in activities associated with DNA damage repair and with biochemical mechanisms used to degrade cellular proteins. Much of her work utilizes a technique known as nuclear magnetic resonance, or NMR, spectrometry, which enables investigators to visualize the three-dimensional structure of macromolecules such as DNA and proteins.