Professor Chen earned his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1972. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He came to UCI in 1993.

The main goal of theoretical plasma physics research is to understand, at a fundamental level, collective oscillations in essentially collision-free fully ionized gases (plasmas). Such plasmas exist both in the space environment, such as the Earth's Van Allen radiation belt, and in laboratory experiments, such as the Joint European Torus (JET) for controlled thermonuclear fusion research.

For the past decade or so, my main research interest has been in the area of unstable collective oscillations (instabilities) excited by energetic [O(102) keV ~ O(1) MeV] particles in magnetically confined plasmas. The energetic particles are produced during either geomagnetic storm events or intense laboratory heating and/or future Deuterium- Tritium (D-T) fusion experiments. These collective instabilities not only could explain the observed electromagnetic wave perturbations but also could lead to, due to their macroscopic temporal and spatial scales, anomalously enhanced transport coefficients, thus affecting the energetic-particle contents and, in the case of alpha particles in the D-T experiments, the crucially important fusion ignition conditions.