[2] In 2018, he was transferred to Beijing to serve as Professor and Director of the Institute of Tibet Plateau Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
[2] He proposed and demonstrated the "Westerly Climate Regime" in Asia during the Holocene epoch and confirmed rapid changes in Asian monsoons.
[3] In 2010, Chen and his colleague Zhang Dongju, his former Ph.D. student, began studying the Xiahe mandible, an unusual hominin fossil discovered in 1980 in the Baishiya Karst Cave by a Tibetan monk.
[4][5][6] In 2018, Zhang led a systematic excavation of the cave and discovered numerous palaeolithic tools and animal bones bearing cut marks.
In collaboration with Jean-Jacques Hublin at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, they used palaeoproteomic analysis to confirm that the mandible belonged to the first known Denisovan outside Siberia, and the earliest human known to have lived on the high-altitude Tibetan Plateau, dating to 160,000 years ago.