Chia Shen is SEAS Senior Research Fellow and Director of the SDR Lab at Harvard University. Her lab conducts interdisciplinary research in human-computer interaction, interactive visualization, informal science education, and learning systems design. She is currently PI for the NSF sponsored project Life on Earth.

Her previous research was on tabletop user interface and interaction techniques. DiamondSpin, developed at MERL under her direction during 2001–2003, is the first open toolkit made available to the tabletop research community and academic institutes throughout the world for the construction of experimental multi-user tabletop concepts and applications. 

Chia Shen was a Senior Research Scientist at the Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs (MERL) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she also served as Associate Director of the Research Lab from 2003 to 2006. Dr. Shen was Conference Chair of the 20th ACM UIST 2007, and served on the IEEE Technical Committees on Real Time Systems and Operating Systems and Application Environments. She is on the Editorial Board of ACM Computers in Entertainment, and on the Steering Committee of the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces.