She graduated from the Medical and Neuroscience Ph.D. programs at The Fourth Military Medical University in China, and finished her postdoctoral training in the Department of Neurobiology at Yale School of Medicine. Dr Chen uses state of the art functional imaging techniques to study brain mechanisms and pathways underlying the perception of touch and pain. She also uses these methods to study reorganization of sensory areas in the brain following spinal cord injury, and how this reorganization modifies sensory perception and influences functional recovery.