[7] Chen retired from University of California, Irvine (UCI) in 2012, assuming the title professor emeritus of physics and astronomy.

His great-grandfather, Chengyi Huang (黃承乙) was the mayor of Taiwan County, now Taichung City, during the Guangxu period of the Qing dynasty.

They joined his father, Lee Chen (陳禮, 1913–2003), at the Tiu Keng Leng refugee camp in Hong Kong, where he began his education.

They developed a theory for long-period magnetic pulsations in the magnetosphere based on resonant coupling between hydromagnetic compressional waves and transverse Alfvén continuous spectrum.

With Chio-Zong Cheng and Morrell S. Chance, Chen predicted the existence of hydromagnetic Alfvén bound states in laboratory plasmas due to realistic symmetry-breaking equilibrium conditions.

Chen is also well known for his collaboration with Roscoe White and Marshall Rosenbluth in demonstrating theoretically that supra-thermal energetic particles can spontaneously excite in laboratory plasmas a unique macroscopic hydromagnetic wave, observed experimentally as “fishbones” from the magnetic signals.

[9] This nonlinear process has a broad scope of applications and has been generalized to the zonal structures in charged particle phase space.

In 1985, Chen helped Shih-Tung Tsai and Changxuan Yu to establish the Chinese Summer School for Plasma Physics.