Prof. Chen received his PhD degree from Deakin University, Australia, in 2001, and was an Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia, and returned to China in 2012. He is currently the Deputy Director of the State Key Laboratory of Biogeology and Environmental Geology of the China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), the Leading Distinguished Professor of Dida Scholar, a Second-Class professor, a supervisor of doctoral candidates, the Chairman of the Triassic Stratigraphy Subsection of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICOS), and the Vice-President of the International Society of Palaeogeography (ISP). He has served as Changjiang Scholar (Distinguished Professor) of the Ministry of Education, Distinguished Professor of the One Hundred Person Project of Hubei Province, Chairman of the IGCP-572 and IGCP-630 projects of International Geoscience Rsearch Program, and has served/is serving as the Associate Editor-in-Chief or Editor-in-Chief of three SCI journals and as a Guest Editor of nine international SCI journals for 16 times. IGCP 572 (2008-2013) and IGCP 630 (2014-2019) are projects jointly funded by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS). Since becoming the Chair of IGCP-572 and IGCP-630, he has taken the lead in organizing and hosting 19 international conference sessions and 14 international field geology site symposia, having actively promoted global research on the Permian-Triassic extinction and subsequent recovery.

He was invited to participate in the writing of the International Geological Time Scale (IGTS)(2020 Edition), and was the main author of the Triassic chapter; he was also the author of the National White Paper on Sedimentology Development Strategy for 2020-2030 (in Chinese and English) in the direction of biosedimentology. He has published a total of 254 SCI papers, including first/corresponding author papers in Nature Geoscience, Nature Communications, Science Advances, and first/corresponding author papers in 7 NI journals: Current Biology (1), Geology (1), PRS-B (1) and PRS-B (1). (1), PRS-B (1), EPSL (2), GRL (2); 7 highly cited papers,  citation of single paper up to 556 times; SCI papers were cited a total of 8,481 times (Data from Web of Science, September 2023 ), H-factor: 54. He has ranked in Elsevier (Elsevier) highly cited Chinese scholars list during 2021-2023 successively . Prof. Chen received Second Prize of Natural Science of Hubei Province in 2022 (ranked first).