Dr. Yan Chen is a professor in School of Mechanical Engineering at Tianjin University, China. She received her PhD in structural engineering at University of Oxford, UK in 2004. With a short PostDoc research experience in Oxford, she became an assistant professor in School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In 2012, she was selected as one of National 'One-thousand Young Talents' by the Chinese government authority, she moved to Tianjin University as a professor. She is also the Fellow of Institution of Mechanical Engineers UK and the Vice-Chair of Chinese Committee, International Federation for the Promotion of Mechanism and Machine Science (IFToMM).

Her research specialty is on the emerging and advanced structures, which have internal mobility for shape transformation, with kinematics and mechanics as the theoretical foundations, aerospace deployable structures and robotics as application platforms, light-weight eco-material and medical microstructures as extension. Recently, she has applied the advanced kinematic theory to analysis and synthesis of rigid origami patterns. In 2015, her team has solved the problem on origami of thick panels, one of the major challenges in origami engineering, which was published on Science.