Professor Vicki Chen is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology. She was formerly Head of the School of Chemical Engineering at the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Sydney, where she has strategically and successfully led the School's performance in research, teaching, infrastructure development, and academic recruitment. With a multitude of national research grants, Professor Chen is a highly successful researcher with over 11,000 citations and 190 publications to her name.

Professor Chen has also held senior positions as the Director of UNESCO Centre for Membrane Science and Technology and has held other significant roles, leading major multi-institutional, collaborative projects with Australian and international industrial partners such as Australian Low Emission Coal R&D, Bluescope Steel and BASF. Professor Chen's collaborations have seen a number of high profile outcomes including new antifouling coatings, novel processes for water purification and brine treatment, COcapture technologies, and high performance nano-composite materials. In 2020, she was elected as the Fellow of Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering.

Professor Chen is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE).

Researcher biography

Professor Chen graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of Minnesota. She has over twenty five years research experience in the areas of membrane separation, gas separation, biocatalytic systems, nanomaterials, and water treatment. She was professor of chemical engineering at the University of New South Wales from 2008 - 2018, the Director of the UNESCO Centre for Membrane Science and Technology from 2006 - 2014 and head of school of chemical engineering fron 2014 - 2018. She is currently on the editorial board for the Journal of Membrane Science and was formerly on the editorial board for Desalination Journal.

She currently holds ARC Discovery grants ("Putting MOFs to Work on Interfaces") and has recently held funding from diverse sources such as CO2CRC, Coal Innovation NSW, ARC Linkage program, and CRC-P (Printed Energy).