Chen earned a bachelor's degree from National Taiwan University in 1997, then a doctorate at Princeton University in 2002. After defending her dissertation, A superthermal ultra-cold neutron source, Chen completed a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She began teaching at Indiana University Bloomington in 2005, and was appointed the James H. Rudy Professor of Physics. She received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2007, and was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2018, for her research into experimental nuclear physics. In 2022 she became a Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.