Jennifer Yen

Jennifer Yen serves as Chief Data Scientist at HopeScan Initiative, where she leads the build-out of HopeScan’s data repository and knowledge base on cancer in African populations. That work brings together incidence and mortality across cancer types, national cancer policy, funding, past and current global initiatives, and the gaps where digital health, AI and stronger health infrastructure can change outcomes, with a focus on the countries of the West African sub-region.

 

Jennifer is a Senior Director of Bioinformatics at a precision oncology company developing highly sensitive blood tests that detect and monitor cancer. She has spent more than a decade in cancer genomics and diagnostics, leading computational biology for biopharma collaborations at Exai Bio, building and managing bioinformatics teams at Guardant Health, and beginning in clinical genomics at Personalis.

 

Her published research spans the zebrafish reference genome and the sequence of the human X chromosome, the analysis of cell-free DNA from tens of thousands of patients with advanced cancer, plasma-based detection of BRCA reversion mutations, and AI models that detect early-stage lung cancer from a blood sample.

 

Jennifer holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and a Bachelor of Science in Molecular Biology from the University of Toronto.