Dr. Xiaoying Chen earned her B.M. in preventive medicine from Wenzhou Medical University in China. She received an M.M. degree in epidemiology and health statistics from Ningbo University, China, and an M.S. degree in genetics from Université Paris Cité in France.

She completed her Ph.D. in the laboratory of Dr. Pierre-Antoine Defossez, where she focused on epigenetics, particularly DNA methylation and cellular senescence in cancer. During her doctoral training, she employed the auxin-inducible degron (AID) system to deplete UHRF1 or/and DNMT1 and investigated the short-term and long-term consequences of DNA methylation loss in vitro and in vivo.

In September 2025, Dr. Chen joined the laboratory of Dr. Peter Jones at Van Andel Institute as a postdoctoral fellow. Her research focuses on DNA methylation dynamics, epigenomic regulation and chromatin architecture in development and disease. She will integrate high-throughput sequencing approaches with bioinformatic analyses to investigate how CTCF and DNA methylation cooperate to shape 3D genome organization and transcriptional outcomes during cellular differentiation.