Her research focus is second language acquisition, which is an interdisciplinary subject falling on the intersection among linguistics, psychology, and education. She is especially interested in how cognitive processes and mechanisms such as statistical learning take effect in people's learning and processing an additional language other than their native languages. Her teaching interests at Duke Kunshan include technology-enhanced Chinese language instruction, intercultural communication in the digital age, and research methods.

She has had papers published in leading academic journals in and out of mainland China, including Computer Assisted Language Learning, System, and Linguistic Sciences (in Chinese). She has won awards of teaching and research paper contests as well as talent program grants at the municipal and provincial levels. She is now serving on the editorial board of a journal named the Korea Association of Multimedia-Assisted Language Learning, and has been a lifetime member of the Chinese Language Teachers Association, USA, and the Chinese Association for Artificial Intelligence since 2019 and 2021 respectively.

Chen has a B.A. in teaching Chinese as a second language and an M.A. in linguistics and applied linguistics from Beijing Language and Culture University, and a Ph.D. in second language acquisition from the University of Iowa. She joined Duke kunshan in July, 2020 after the completion of her Ph.D. studies.