Teng obtained a Bachelor’s degree in computer science and biology from Washington University in Saint Louis. In his undergraduate years, he made contributions to the field of biofabrication through research works with Dr. Anthony Atala at the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Afterwards Teng joined McDonnell Genome Institute, where he worked with Dr. Christopher Maher and Dr. Jin Zhang to develop INTEGRATE-vis, a gene fusion visualization tool.
At MSK, Teng’s research involved large-scale analysis of clonal hematopoiesis (CH), or age-related mutations in hematopoietic cells, a biological process at the intersection of aging and cancer. He first worked with Dr. Kelly Bolton in a study of the role of oncologic therapy in clonal hematopoiesis. He next developed a computational method to detect deeply subclonal chromosomal alterations from targeted deep sequencing data and applied it in 32,000 patients to provide one of the first large-scale characterizations of the interplay between gene mutations and chromosomal alterations in clonal hematopoiesis.