Chen Chen

Chen Chen is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of Virginia, leading the Chandra Robot Autonomy Lab (CRΔL). He previously held postdoctoral positions at UT Austin's Texas Robotics and earned his PhD from the University of Maryland.

Research Focus:

• Robust multi-robot navigation in human crowds
• Graph-based machine learning for epidemiological modeling
• Decentralized control with safety guarantees
• Fairness-aware reinforcement learning

His work bridges theoretical guarantees (control barrier functions, game theory) with real-world applications in service robotics and computational epidemiology. Recent projects enable deadlock-free navigation in densely constrained spaces and LLM-mediated social coordination.

Honors include Microsoft Robotics/AI Future Leader (2023), KAUST Rising Star (2023), and RSS Pioneer (2022). He serves on RA-L editorial board and organizes workshops at robotics conferences.

Teaching includes graduate courses in machine learning and discrete mathematics. Actively recruiting PhD students for projects in multi-agent systems and robot learning.