I am the Nortel Networks Assistant Professor of Electrical & Computer Engineering with a secondary appointment in Computer Science at Duke University. I direct the FuNCtions Lab, working with a group of talented students on projects across the networking, communication, sensing, and energy-efficient computing aspects of wireless, mobile, optical, and quantum networked systems.
My research focuses on both theoretical and experimental aspects of massive antenna systems and millimeter-wave networks, optical and quantum networks, and spectrum sharing systems, and their convergence with edge cloud, energy-efficient computing, and AI/ML. I enjoy building efficient hardware–software systems and experimental testbeds at scale.
Before joining Duke in Fall 2021, I was a postdoc in Electrical Engineering at Yale University (2020–2021), working with Prof. Leandros Tassiulas and Prof. Lin Zhong. I received my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Columbia University in 2020 (advisor: Prof. Gil Zussman) and my B.Eng. in Electronic Engineering from Tsinghua University in 2014.
I am always looking for motivated B.S., M.S., Ph.D. students and Postdocs to join my group at Duke ECE. If interested, email me your CV, transcript, and a brief note on your research interests.
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Current projects
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All publicationsRecent news
All newsFuNCtions lab is part of a $24M ARO ICE-CEM Center led by Duke focusing on inducing cyber and physical effects in unmanned aerial systems via cyber-EM convergence.
Prof. Chen is a co-PI of a 3-year, $4.1M NSF VINES Track 2 award on AReS, which aims to assess, restore, and support post-disaster connectivity and situational awareness through AI-enabled ISAC and ISAC-AR integration. This project is led by Princeton University, in collaboration with UC Santa Barbara, UW-Madison, and Ericsson.
A paper on in-situ radar sensing on 5G base stations with zero-shot template generation was accepted to ACM MobiHoc’26. [arXiv]
FuNCtions lab received a grant from ARO to work on real-time, scalable, and programmable radio architectures based on the RFSoC platforms leveraging AI and agentic workflows.
The NSF AI Institute for Edge Computing and Systems (Athena), led by Duke, was renewed with a 5-year, $15M award to pursue “Immersive AI in the Physical World” across computing systems, foundational AI, physical AI, and applications.
Prof. Chen is the PI of a $9M grant from ARO focused on RAPTORS–Rapid Analog Processing for Tactical Observation and Opportunistic Radio Spectrum Access. In collaboration with Professors Miroslav Pajic and David Smith (Duke), Arun Natarajan (Yale), Aravind Nagulu (Northeastern), and Raytheon BBN Technologies, this project aims to build intelligent sensing radios and networks with low SWaP-C.
A paper on optimizing arbitrary RF containment using tactical aerial networks and differentiable ray tracing was accepted to IEEE MILCOM’26.
Prof. Chen is the PI of an NSF VINES Track 1 Award focused on building photonics-enabled, energy-efficient massive MIMO radios. This project is in collaboration with Professors Ali Niknejad, Jun-Chau Chien, and Zaijun Chen from UC Berkeley.
A paper on 5G mmWave ISAC through sub-symbol beam switching with CSI extraction and reconstruction was accepted to IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing (TMC). A preliminary version of the work was also presented at IEEE MTT-S RFSA’26.
One paper on fiber sensing-based borehole seismic velocity profiling was accepted to ECOC’26. This paper was based on a field trial we conducted at the Newberry Well, OR, and in collaboration with Enegis LLC and NEC Labs America.
Selected talks
Acknowledgments
Our research projects are supported in part by grants from NSF (VINES Track 1, CAREER, CIRC GRAND/ENS, CC* Integration-Large, NewSpectrum, EAGER, SII-NRDZ, CISE Core, SWIFT, and Athena AI Institute for Edge Computing), ARO (W911NF-26-2-A164, W911NF-26-2-A158, W911NF-25-1-0241), SRC/DARPA JUMP 2.0 Center for Ubiquitous Connectivity (CUbiC), Duke Science & Technology Initiative and Pratt School of Engineering, as well as grants and gifts from ACM SIGMOBILE, Enegis, Google, IBM, NEC Labs America, NTT, and NVIDIA. The findings, positions, or opinions of our research projects do not necessarily represent the official policy of any of these organizations.
