Chen grew up as a child of Chinese immigrants in Ohio,[3]
and graduated from the Ohio State University with a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering in 1981. After earning a master's degree in mechanical engineering in 1982 at the University of California, Berkeley,[1] under the mentorship of Boris Rubinsky,[3] she continued at Stanford University for doctoral study in the same subject. She completed her Ph.D. in 1989;[1] her doctoral advisor at Stanford was Brian J. Cantwell.[4]
She has worked at Sandia since finishing her education and is a pioneer of massively parallel direct numerical simulation of turbulent combustion with complex chemistry [5]. She has led teams of computer scientists, applied mathematicians and computational engineers on the co-design of combustion simulation software for exascale computing (10^18 flops).
Recognition
In 2018, Chen was elected to the National Academy of Engineering "for contributions to the computational simulation of turbulent reacting flows with complex chemistry".[5][6]
In the same year, the Society of Women Engineers gave her an Achievement Award, their top honor,[7] and the Combustion Institute awarded her the Bernard Lewis Gold Medal, "for her exceptional skill in linking high performance computing and combustion research to deliver fundamental insights into turbulence-chemistry interactions".[8] The Combustion Institute and the American Physical Society also named her as one of its fellows.[8][9][10]