After leaving Tsinghua University, Chen worked at AT&T in Beijing. He later did a postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University. Chen has taught at Syracuse University since 2000, and has been the John E. and Patricia A. Breyer professor of electrical engineering since 2017. He has been area editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and associate editor for the IEEE Communications Letters, the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, and the EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking.
