Dr. Chen received a Ph.D. in Early Childhood Education from the East China Normal University. She was a postdoctoral research fellow and a lecturer at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the co-Principal Investigator of the Collaborative for Early Rural Education in China (CEREC Lab) at Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow of 2020.

Dr. Chen’s work is primarily concerned with the ways in which language and literacy environments of young children—in and out of school, monolingual and bilingual—can be designed to support children’s development. Dr. Chen’s research focuses on detecting the effectiveness of randomized literacy interventions in China, especially in rural early childhood education settings. Using experimental, quasi-experimental, and observational methodologies, Dr. Chen has studied: the causal impacts of bilingual curricular resources on the vocabulary development of language minority children in China, the effects of large-scale family-oriented shared book reading interventions on parental education beliefs and children’s vocabulary development, and how free-of-charge early childhood facilities in villages improve economically disadvantaged children’s academic achievement in elementary schools.

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