Martha Alter Chen (born February 9, 1944[1]) is an American academic, scholar and social worker, who is presently a lecturer in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School[2] and senior advisor of the global research-policy-action network WIEGO (Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing)[3] and a member of the Advisory Board of the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER).

Cum Laude (with honors in English literature) from Connecticut College for Women and a PhD in South Asian Studies from the University of Pennsylvania.

Once they reached the US, Martha and her husband joined the "Friends of Bangladesh" political campaign against the US for supporting West Pakistan.

The money left over from the cyclone relief was used to start an NGO for Bengali refugees returning from India called the Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee (BRAC), which is now the largest non governmental agency in the world.

In 1999, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University invited Chen to be its Horner Distinguished Visiting Professor in recognition of her scholarship on the situation of working poor women around the world.

[8] In 2006, Woodstock School in Mussoorie recognized Chen as a Distinguished Alumna for her work with poor women in South Asia, especially for her work examining the status of widows in India by undertaking extensive field research and organizing a national conference on what can be done to improve the status of widows.

Chen edited a volume of proceedings from the conference called Widows in Rural India: Social Neglect and Public Action.