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 on learning and visualization through human-computer interaction, large life science visualization, and multi-touch collaboration. She is PI of the multi-institutional Life on Earth project (NSF DRL#1010889). 

Chia is a pioneer in 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. Her research has been featured in Biomedical Computation Review, Harvard Gazette, the New Scientist, MIT Technology Review, Computer Power User Magazine, New Scientist, Danish Weekly, the Discovery Science Channel, and the National Geographic Channel.

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 (ITS). Dr. Shen received Service Awards for her role as Conference Chair of the 20th ACM UIST 2007, and the 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.