Chia Shen is a Senior Research Fellow and Director of the SDR Lab at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. Her lab conducts research in areas of HCI (human-computer interaction), interactive and tactile visual learning, large data visualization, and multi-touch collaboration. She is PI of the $2.3M NSF funded multi-institutional Life on Earth project (NSF DRL#1010889).
Chia is a pioneer in multi-touch user interface designs, multi-touch tabletop systems and collaborative display environments.DiamondSpin, developed at MERL under her direction during 2001–2003, is the first open toolkit made available to the multi-touch research community and academic institutes throughout the world for the construction of experimental multi-user tabletop user-interface and applications. She has over 80 co-authored scholarly papers and book chapters. Her patent portfolio represents the outcome of some of her innovative research projects. Her research has been featured in Biomedical Computation Review, Harvard Gazette, the New Scientist, Computer Power User Magazine, New Scientist, Danish Weekly, the Discovery Science Channel, the National Geographic Channel, and PBS/NOVA Engaging Science.
She is on the Editorial Board of ACM Computers in Entertainment. She was on the Steering Committee of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS) from 2007 - 2014. Dr. Shen received Service Awards for her role as Conference Chair of the 20th ACM UIST 2007 and the Conference Co-Chair of 2012 ACM ITS. She previously served on the IEEE Technical Committees on Real Time Systems and Operating Systems and Application Environments. She received the IEEE ifip 2010 Outstanding Contrinution Award at EUC2010. Before her appointment at Harvard, Chia was a Senior Research Scientist at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and served as Associate Director of the Research Lab from 2003 to 2006.