Chen Wang

Senior Research Software Engineer, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

I build software for science: science gateways, research applications, data platforms, and AI/ML pipelines, spanning medical imaging, biotechnology, climate, natural hazard resilience, public health, and social media research. I am a former atmospheric science researcher, and I am still the happiest at the intersection of interdisciplinary science and code. Alongside this, I have grown a genuine passion for technical project management, backed by hands on experience putting it into practice. What drives me most is helping interdisciplinary science teams navigate complexity and reach their goals.

Born and raised in Shanghai, China. In my spare time, I enjoy painting and drawing, sewing and crafting, and I am always keen on picking up new languages to learn. More recently I have fallen for hiking, though as a city girl at heart, I keep it easy and scenic.

Experience

Education

Professional Projects

Social Media Macroscope Lead

Science gateway for social media analytics

A globally used suite of social media analytics tools. I led the NCSA Center Directed Discretionary Research project evolving SMM for new use cases including industry applications, and through Illinois Computes, with Prof. Tess McNulty (English), integrated YouTube data sources and analytics.

Illinois Cloud Biofoundry Technical Lead

AI, cloud computing, and automated scientific workflows

A platform that makes biological research more accessible and efficient by letting researchers interact with scientific knowledge and computational tools through an AI driven interface, going from a research question to a planned and executable experiment.

Direct Air Capture Hub Technical Lead

DOE funded, with Illinois Sustainable Technology Center

An application for planning optimal greenhouse gas capturing site locations across the Illinois Basin.

MarginDx

ARPA-H funded

Surgical precision for tumor removal, with AI model optimization for tumor imaging and detection.

Illinois Chat

University of Illinois

An AI teaching assistant platform supporting deep document search, literature review, and creative research applications.

Permafrost Discovery Gateway

Woodwell Climate Research Center

AI/ML driven tracking of Arctic permafrost thaw.

IN-CORE

NIST funded, Interdependent Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment

Backend services, scientific computation packages, and web applications for natural hazard and community resilience research.

Clowder Framework

NSF CSSI funded, open source

A data management system for long tail research data. Related NIH funded work integrated ML models predicting CONSORT statement labels.

SHIELD K-12 Playbook Lead

Rockefeller Foundation funded

An interactive web application guiding K-12 school reopening during COVID-19. Related work included AWS pipelines automating COVID-19 test result ingestion and a quarantine procedure application for Champaign-Urbana public health administrators.

SMILE

Social Media Intelligence and Learning Environment, Technology Services, UIUC

A web application for social media data ingestion and analysis built with GraphQL, Node.js, AWS, and HUBzero, with NLP, network visualization, and sentiment analysis.

Personal Projects

Twentyfour

Web game

The 24 game, make 24 from four numbers.

Inktober

Illustration series

Ink drawings, one prompt a day through October.

Study Notes

Open notebook

Notes I keep while learning things.

Art Portfolio

Flickr

Paintings, drawings, and crafts.

Publications

Journal papers
  1. Nofal, O. M., Rosenheim, N., Kameshwar, S., Patil, J., Zhou, X., van de Lindt, J. W., et al., & Wang, C. (2025). Methodology for Interdependent Population, Building, and Infrastructure Posthazard Functionality Assessment for Communities. Journal of Structural Engineering, 151(5), 04025048.
  2. Nofal, O., Rosenheim, N., Kameshwar, S., Patil, J., Zhou, X., van de Lindt, J. W., et al., Wang, C., & Jeon, H. (2024). Community level post hazard functionality methodology for buildings exposed to floods. Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering, 39(8), 1099 to 1122.
  3. Donelson, C., Sutter, C., Pham, G. V., Narang, K., Wang, C., & Yun, J. T. (2021). Using a Machine Learning Methodology to Analyze Reddit Posts regarding Child Feeding Information. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 30(5), 1290 to 1298.
  4. Yuan, R., Sun, J., Luo, T., Wu, X., Wang, C., & Fu, Y. (2014). Simulation study on light propagation in an anisotropic turbulence field of entrainment zone. Optics Express, 22(11), 13427 to 13437.
  5. Yuan, R., Sun, J., Luo, T., Wu, X., Wang, C., & Lu, C. (2014). Simulation study on light propagation in an isotropic turbulence field of the mixed layer. Optics Express, 22(6), 7194 to 7209.
  6. Wang, C., Yuan, R., Luo, T., Sun, J., Jiang, W., & Wu, X. (2013). Flux observation research on urban and suburban atmospheric boundary layers in Nanjing. Journal of University of Science and Technology of China, 43(2), 87 to 96.
Conference papers and presentations
  1. Baroi, C., O'Brien, K., Meschewski, E., Lee, J. S., Wang, C., Taft, K., et al., & Johnson, W. (2024). Illinois Basin Direct Air Capture (DAC) Hub: A Master Planned Community. SSRN 5013245.
  2. Lee, J. S., Navarro, C. M., Núñez-Corrales, S., Naum, K., Wang, C., Kim, Y. W., Kooper, R., van de Lindt, J. W., & Kruse, J. L. (2022). IN-CORE, Computational Platform for Community Resilience Planning. AGU Fall Meeting.
  3. Wang, C., Marini, L., Burnette, M., Nicholson, T., Lambert, M., Kooper, R., Nguyen, H., & McHenry, K. (2022). Applications and Roadmap of the Clowder Open Source Data Management Framework. Australasian Computer Science Week (ACSW).
  4. Lee, J. S., Navarro, C. M., Naraharisetty, V. V. G., & Wang, C. (2022). Modeling Critical Lifelines and Other Infrastructure with IN-CORE: A Hands-On Workshop. ASCE Lifelines.
  5. Wang, C., Marini, L., Chin, C. L., Vance, N., Donelson, C., Meunier, P., & Yun, J. T. (2019). Social Media Intelligence and Learning Environment: an Open Source Framework for Social Media Data Collection, Analysis and Curation. 15th International Conference on eScience (IEEE), 252 to 261.
  6. Lee, J. S., Navarro, C. M., Tolbert, N., Kim, Y. W., Naraharisetty, V. V. G., Wang, C., et al., & Fredricksen, M. (2019). Interdependent Networked Community Resilience Modeling Environment (IN-CORE). PEARC '19, 1 to 2.

Professional Service

Awards and Grants

News and Press

Certifications

Google Project Management Professional Certificate

Skills

Languages
Python, JavaScript, Java, MATLAB, Fortran, HTML; familiar with Scala, C, PHP, R
Frameworks
React, Vue, AngularJS, Next.js, Express.js, FastAPI, Flask, scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch
AI and ML
Retrieval augmented generation (embeddings, chunking, hybrid search, reranking, evaluation), model serving and inference with ONNX and quantization, MLOps with MLflow, Weights & Biases, and model registries
DevOps and Cloud
Docker, Kubernetes, AWS, GCP
Databases
PostgreSQL, MongoDB, SQL, Qdrant, pgvector
Geospatial
QGIS, GDAL, GeoServer, OpenLayers, MapLibre
Modeling
STELLA system modeling, Weather Research and Forecasting Model
Design
Figma, InVision, Miro

Spoken Languages

English, Mandarin, Japanese (JLPT N1); working proficiency in Korean.