Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology
Xie Chen is a Professor of Theoretical Physics at the California Institute of Technology. Dr. Chen obtained her BSc degree from Tsinghua University in 2006 and PhD degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2012. She was a Miller research fellow at the University of California Berkeley for two years before joining Caltech in 2014. Dr. Chen is a condensed matter theorist. She has made a series of contributions to the study of strongly correlated quantum many-body systems, including the classification of gapped phases in one dimension, discovery and systematic construction of symmetry protected topological phases in bosonic system in two and higher dimensions, classification and anomaly detection in symmetry enriched topological phases, the tensor network representation of topological phases and unitary evolutions, and the study of fracton models. Dr. Chen was the recipient of NSF Faculty Early Career Award and the Sloan Research Fellowship Award. She was awarded the New Horizons in Physics Prize in 2020 by the Breakthrough Foundation for her incisive contributions to the understanding of topological states of matter and the relationships between them. In 2021, she was named a Simons Investigator by the Simons foundation.