Jonathan Chen, MD, PhD

I wanted to show how presentation techniques can make the ordinary seem extraordinary.

— Jonathan Chen, MD, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical informatics

While the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic were challenging for most people, the experience of Jonathan Chen, MD, PhD, was particularly trying. As he documented in a poignant thread on X (then Twitter), Chen, assistant professor of medicine, had to manage a two-career household with two kids who were largely homeschooled during the pandemic. During that time, his mother developed COVID, which required Chen to commute between Northern and Southern California frequently for several months as her condition deteriorated, other medical problems set in, and she ultimately died.

“It’s no exaggeration to objectively say that 2021 was the worst year of my life,” Chen admits.

In addition to his personal trials, he had a full work schedule to maintain. He provided clinical care as a hospitalist on the front lines treating COVID patients amid surging hospital volumes, while also leading a clinical informatics research lab as a member of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, the division of hospital medicine, and the Clinical Excellence Research Center.

Besides friends, family, and purposeful work, curiously a blend of magic and music offered him the creative outlet to pull through.

Simple magic tricks that Chen had dabbled in as a kid grew into a serious hobby during the height of the pandemic. Perhaps focusing on magic as a means of engaging and delighting others kept Chen sane while so much of life was anything but routine. As he toiled away writing grant proposals, Chen found it therapeutic to rekindle his skills at the piano, which he hadn’t played much since his youth. Slow but steady progress with both hobbies gave him much-needed satisfaction.

When the Stanford School of Medicine’s Medicine & the Muse program started a Stuck@Home concert series over Zoom, Chen chose to play piano for two of those concerts. But, acknowledging that there were many more talented musicians in the School of Medicine than himself, he focused on honing his magic skills and “actually got pretty good at it,” he says.

He has since performed magic for multiple Stuck@Home concerts. He also gave a magic display to open a big show at the Bing Auditorium on the Stanford campus later during the pandemic.

His burgeoning reputation as a magician led to invitations to perform at student recruitment and other events, including the 2021 Stanford School of Medicine MD Program Teaching Awards program (a portion of which can be seen here).

I wanted to show how presentation techniques can make the ordinary seem extraordinary.

— Jonathan Chen, MD, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical informatics

“Early on, I was doing close-up magic because it was just me and another person, but I began attracting larger crowds while performing for students at conferences — until I found myself facing a wall of over 30 pairs of eyes staring at me,” Chen says. “Because a little card trick doesn’t play that well to a larger audience, I’ve expanded my skills and interests to present ‘parlor magic,’ where I entertain with props that everyone can see, such as a newspaper, a rope, large rings, and Rubik’s Cubes.”

His enthusiasm as a performer extended to an April 2023 research colloquium that he led for his biomedical informatics research division. In “Delivering Compelling Talks: Why, What, and How?” he used magic to demonstrate how to manage people’s attention. “I wanted to show how presentation techniques can make the ordinary seem extraordinary,” he says.

For his exceptional abilities, the magician, musician, and bioinformatician was recently recognized with a Department Teaching Award and a competition award from IBM — not the multinational technology corporation, but the International Brotherhood of Magicians!

With the extraordinary challenges of 2021 behind him, Chen continues to balance clinical practice and research. He contributed to a Stanford-Lancet commission on opioids and published multiple perspective commentaries in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the present and future use of computers in medicine. He received funding from the National Institute of Drug Abuse Clinical Trials Network to lead a study on opioid treatment retention and is augmenting human assessments of diagnostic utility of next-generation sequencing tests with support from the Stanford University Institute for Human-Centered AI and the Stanford Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine & Imaging.

In July 2023, after several years of grinding, Chen was thrilled and relieved to be notified of his first National Institutes of Health Research Project R01 grant. He will receive $3.8 million from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to lead a multisite study to measure, predict, and recommend appropriate antibiotics in the face of increasing worldwide antibiotic resistance.

As Mark Musen, MD, PhD, chief of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Informatics Research, says, “Jonathan’s commitment to advancing medical knowledge alongside his creative endeavors paints a picture of a well-rounded individual who is an inspiration for others in our department to find their own paths to renewal.”