LifeX institute is led by the highly-cited bioinformatics scientist Dr. Shifu Chen.

Dr. Chen co-founded the HaploX biotechnology in 2014, and is leading the company’s R&D team. Dr. Chen initiated the OpenGene project in 2016, and has developed more than 10 widely used bioinformatics tools. Dr. Chen is the author of the well-known NGS data preprocessing tool fastp, which has been cited more than 15,000 times. Dr. Chen has published over 60+ papers in peer-review journals, and applied for more than 20 patents. Dr. Chen is an associate editor of the journal iMeta. Dr. Chen received the Shenzhen Young Scientist Award in 2019, and has been continuously selected as one of the world top 2% scientists (Oncology and Bioinformatics) and highly cited researcher in China (Computer Science), and was included in the 2023 Global Scholar Academic Lifetime Influence Ranking (Medicine)

Currently The LifeX Institute has 9 PhDs from different fields conducting researches in bioinformatics, cancers, and AI for life sciences.