[1] A professor at Stony Brook University since 2010, he was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2015 and awarded the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry in 2019.
[3] The last doctoral student of Eugenio Calabi,[3][5] he obtained his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1994, with his dissertation on "Extremal Hermitian Matrices with Curvature Distortion in a Riemann Surface".
[3][5] He was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2015 "for contributions to differential geometry, particularly the theory of extremal Kahler metrics".
It had been one of the most actively investigated topics in geometry since a loose version of it was first proposed in the 1980s by eventual Fields Medalist Shing-Tung Yau after his proof of the Calabi conjecture.
The solution by Chen, Donaldson and Sun was published in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society in 2015 as a three-article series, "Kähler–Einstein metrics on Fano manifolds, I, II and III".