Liaohai Leo Chen earned his PhD in Chemistry from University of Rochester, New York in 1997.  Following the graduation, he did his postdoc training in Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), New Mexico for two years, and then became a technical staff in Los Alamos. In 2001, he moved to Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), first as an assistant Molecular Biologist and later as a Molecular Biologist (tenured equivalent). In ANL, he created a Nano-Bio group in 2005,  and had been the group leader for 7 years.  In 2012, he joined the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Utah State University as a USTAR Professor.  In 2016, he moved back to Chicago, and became a Research Professor in Department of Surgery at UIC, where his research focus on molecular imaging, intraoperative imaging and imaging guided surgery.  In 2020, with the opening of Surgical Innovation Training Laboratory (SITL), Dr. Chen became the founding director of SITL.  Under his leadership, SITL has become a premier institute of (Robotic) surgery training in the nation with an average of 800-1000 surgeons trained annually, as well as an annual revenue exceeding two million dollars. 

Dr. Chen joined Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) in December 2024 as the Directors of Practice Point and BETC, as well as a research professor in the Robotic Engineering Department.  He is leading the effort to create a consortium among WPI, UMass Chan/UMass Memorial and Medtech industry partners for a Center of Excellence in Medical Automation with the aims to develop better tools and new devices for physicians/surgeons, to foster technology innovation and implementation in hospitals, thus to enhance perioperative efficiencies.  Current research themes include 1) developing novel surgical/interventional robotic platforms and surgeon-robot interfaces; 2) towards surgical automation via AI assisted engineering and/or fully AI approaches; 3) creating procedure context awareness and warning system; and 4) enabling soft tissue procedure navigation through the development of new intraoperative imaging modalities, smart imaging probes, and tissue status assessment (perfusion, stress, stiffness, etc) in real time.