She works in the Combustion Research Facility of Sandia National Laboratories, where she is a Senior Scientist.
[1] Her research applies massively parallel computing to the simulation of turbulent combustion.
[4] She has worked at Sandia since finishing her education and is a pioneer of massively parallel direct numerical simulation of turbulent combustion with complex chemistry [5].
In 2018, Chen was elected to the National Academy of Engineering "for contributions to the computational simulation of turbulent reacting flows with complex chemistry".
[5][6] In the same year, the Society of Women Engineers gave her an Achievement Award, their top honor,[7] and the Combustion Institute awarded her the Bernard Lewis Gold Medal, "for her exceptional skill in linking high performance computing and combustion research to deliver fundamental insights into turbulence-chemistry interactions".