Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery
Research Scientist, Neurosurgery Department
Director, Brain Tumor Computational Laboratory

Dr. Jay Hou received his B.S. in Physics and his M.S in Mechanical Engineering at the National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. Later he joined Dr. Robert Mauck’s Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania and developed a high-throughput mechanical device to investigate the stiffness and diffusivity of tissue constructs. He received his PhD in 2018 from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Columbia University, advised by Dr. Gerard Atehsian. During his PhD, he developed a novel multiphasic and multiscale cell-tissue finite element computational model to study the mechanics, transport, and physiology of chondrocytes within cartilage.

Dr. Jay Hou’s postdoctoral training was conducted in Dr. David Odde’s Laboratory at the University of Minnesota. In his postdoc, he applied the biophysical modeling to study cancer cell migration under various conditions: with different adhesion sizes, on viscoelastic substrates, on substrates with stiffness gradients, and within 1D channels. He further applied the biophysical modeling, drug inhibition, bioinformatic analysis to explore the physical and molecular mechanisms of heterogeneous cell migration in glioblastoma PDX cells.

Dr. Jay Hou joined the faculty at Neurosurgery in 2024 and established the Brain Tumor Computational Laboratory, and his research goal is to establish computational and machine learning algorithms, along with experimental protocols, to study the tumor growth and diffusion in glioblastoma patients.