Richard J. Chen

Founding Chief Technology Officer

Richard J. Chen, PhD is the Founding CTO of Modella AI, where he leads the company's software engineering, AI, and UX teams in developing innovative products for biomedical and healthcare applications. Prior to Modella AI, Richard was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where he researched and developed multimodal, context-aware, and generalist AI for computational pathology.

Richard has led the development of multiple, influential AI research and software applications, including: (1) PORPOISE, a multimodal platform for studying pathology-genomics integration in cancer prognosis (Cancer Cell 2022), (2) HIPT, which has paved the way for gigapixel self-supervised learning in whole slide images (CVPR 2022 Oral, (3) UNI, one of the first ROI-level foundation models for human pathology (Nature Med 2024a, Nature Med 2024b), among others. Previously, Richard has also worked at Apple Health on multimodal machine learning and digital biomarker discovery and Microsoft Research on self-supervised AI for pathology. His work has been featured on the cover of Cancer Cell, and in media outlets such as Harvard News, MIT Technology Review, WebMD, among others. Richard received his PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Harvard Medical School, and his BS in Biomedical Engineering and MS in Computer Science from Johns Hopkins University.