PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Irene Chen

Also known as Irene Y. Chen

Irene Chen is an assistant professor at UC Berkeley and UCSF who develops machine learning methods for equitable clinical care and audits algorithmic bias. She earned a joint AB/SM at Harvard in 2014 and an electrical engineering and computer science PhD at MIT in 2022. Her research examined discriminatory predictions in 2018, underdiagnosis in chest X-ray AI in 2021, and the risks of combining training data from different sources in 2024. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Microsoft Research New England, she joined the Berkeley and UCSF faculty in August 2023. She coauthored “The evaluation illusion of large language models in medicine” in 2025 and became an AI2050 Early Career Fellow in 2026.

Works
86
Citations
3,908
h-index
20

Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 28 October 2026.

Timeline

  1. 2014

    Harvard degrees

    She earns a joint AB/SM in applied mathematics at Harvard University in 2014.

  2. 2018

    Diagnosing discriminatory classifiers

    In 2018, she coauthors “Why Is My Classifier Discriminatory?” with Fredrik D. Johansson and David Sontag. The paper breaks measures of discrimination into bias, variance and noise, and proposes data collection to reduce unfair predictions.

  3. 2021

    Bias in chest X-rays

    She coauthors a 2021 Nature Medicine study of underdiagnosis in AI systems for chest X-rays. The team finds that classifiers consistently underdiagnose underserved patient groups, with higher underdiagnosis rates for groups such as Hispanic women.

  4. 2022

    An MIT doctorate

    In 2022, she completes a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Her thesis is “Machine Learning Approaches for Equitable Healthcare.”

  5. August 2023

    Joining Berkeley and UCSF

    Before joining Berkeley, she works at Dropbox and as a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England. In August 2023, she joins UC Berkeley and UCSF as an assistant professor.

  6. 2024

    The Data Addition Dilemma

    With Judy Hanwen Shen and Inioluwa Deborah Raji, she coauthors “The Data Addition Dilemma” at the 2024 Machine Learning for Healthcare Conference. The paper shows that combining training data from different sources can reduce overall accuracy and performance for the worst-performing subgroup.

  7. October 2025

    Evaluating medical language models

    In October 2025, she coauthors “The evaluation illusion of large language models in medicine” with Monica Agrawal, Freya Gulamali and Shalmali Joshi. They examine how choices of data, tasks and metrics can produce misleading conclusions about clinical performance, and call for evaluations that reflect clinical use.

  8. 2026

    An AI2050 fellowship

    In 2026, she becomes an AI2050 Early Career Fellow. Her project examines how people correct, question and report problems with AI to help find failures in deployed systems.

  9. As of October 2026

    Professor in computational precision health

    As of October 2026, she is the Below The Line Assistant Professor in UC Berkeley EECS and an assistant professor in the joint UC Berkeley–UCSF Computational Precision Health program. Her work develops machine learning methods for equitable clinical care and audits algorithmic bias.

Career

  1. Since 2023University of California, BerkeleyAssistant Professor, Computational Precision Health program
  2. Since 2023University of California, San FranciscoAssistant Professor, Computational Precision Health program
  3. NowUniversity of California, BerkeleyBelow The Line Assistant Professor
  4. Microsoft ResearchPostdoctoral Researcher

Education

  1. 2022Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPhD in electrical engineering and computer science
  2. 2014Harvard UniversityJoint AB/SM in applied mathematics

From the biography.

Checked career sources: www2.eecs.berkeley.edu, irenechen.net, news.berkeley.edu.

Colleagues

People named in this biography, and people with dated positions at the same organization in the same years.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Irene Chen yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. Irene Chen | EECS at UC Berkeley www2.eecs.berkeley.edu. Checked 28 October 2026.
  2. Why Is My Classifier Discriminatory? papers.nips.cc. Checked 28 October 2026.
  3. Underdiagnosis bias of artificial intelligence algorithms applied to chest radiographs in under-served patient populations | Nature Medicine nature.com. Checked 28 October 2026.
  4. Irene Y. Chen - UC Berkeley and UCSF irenechen.net. Checked 28 October 2026.
  5. Meet our new faculty: Irene Chen, computational precision health - Berkeley News news.berkeley.edu. Checked 28 October 2026.
  6. Computational Precision Health program welcomes new faculty, invites Ph.D. applicants aiming to transform health care | CDSS at UC Berkeley cdss.berkeley.edu. Checked 28 October 2026.
  7. Irene Chen | Research UC Berkeley vcresearch.berkeley.edu. Checked 28 October 2026.
  8. The Data Addition Dilemma proceedings.mlr.press. Checked 28 October 2026.
  9. The evaluation illusion of large language models in medicine | npj Digital Medicine nature.com. Checked 28 October 2026.
  10. Irene Chen - AI2050 ai2050.schmidtsciences.org. Checked 28 October 2026.