Chinfei Chen

Chinfei Chen is an American neuroscientist and member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences studying synaptic plasticity. She is a professor of neurology and neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and the Associate Director of the Harvard Program in Neuroscience. She also works as a research associate in neurology at the Boston Children's Hospital.

Early life Chinfei Chen, born in the United States to Taiwanese immigrants, spent her early years in Wilmington, Delaware. Her father had previously moved to the United States to pursue a graduate degree in architecture. followed by postdoctoral training with Wade Regehr at Harvard Medical School. Building on her postdoctoral work in the Regehr lab, her own lab has characterized the normal developmental changes in the retinogeniculate synapse, and examined the activity- and experience-dependent mechanisms governing its anatomical and functional reorganization. This work was important, because it showed that plasticity in sensory systems, long thought to be mainly instantiated by changes in cortical circuits during limited developmental windows because of the Nobel Prize-winning work of David H. Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, could also occur in subcortical regions.

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