Owen finished his MPhil on Bioinformatics and Biological Statistics in 2015 from the University of Hong Kong with the supervision of Prof Pak Chung Sham and Prof Karen SL Lam.  He studied and worked at Beijing Genomics Institute, Shenzhen for 4.5 years since 2010 when he was the final year undergraduate student at Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Owen's previous research was on the human gut microbiome, including several metagenome-wide association studies on complex diseases, including type 2 diabetes, colorectal cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and gastric cancer.

Owen is now conducting a PhD in functional and population genomics with the supervision of Dr Michael Inouye and Kathryn Holt.