{"id":46519,"date":"2026-05-07T15:24:47","date_gmt":"2026-05-07T19:24:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/webpublishing.oit.ncsu.edu\/ise-ncsu-edu\/?post_type=person&#038;p=46519"},"modified":"2026-05-07T15:24:47","modified_gmt":"2026-05-07T19:24:47","slug":"karen-chen","status":"publish","type":"person","link":"https:\/\/webpublishing.oit.ncsu.edu\/ise-ncsu-edu\/people\/karen-chen\/","title":{"rendered":"Karen Chen"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Karen Chen<\/strong> joined NC State&#8217;s Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering as a faculty member in August 2016. Prior to joining ISE, she was a postdoctoral research associate at the Healthcare Systems Engineering Institute at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n<p>Chen&#8217;s research in human-technology interactions focuses on studying human performances and behaviors (in terms of limits and capacity), with applications in training, learning, and healthcare. She offers courses in Human Factors in Systems Design, Systems Safety Engineering, and Virtual Reality and Human Factors.<\/p>\n<p>Chen is funded by National Science Foundation (NSF) and by National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). She is a faculty member of the occupational safety and ergonomics (OSE) program of the NC Occupational Safety and Health Education and Research Center (ERC). She also collaborates with The Ergonomics Center of North Carolina for industry projects. Her work on virtual and mixed reality technologies is also disseminated via local media (WRAL5, CW22, PBC NC), outreach for K-12 students underrepresented in STEM, and panels at North Carolina Comicon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38589,"featured_media":46530,"template":"","group":[28],"person_tag":[2061,2062],"class_list":["post-46519","person","type-person","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","group-faculty","person_tag-faculty","person_tag-karen-chen"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Karen Chen | Associate Professor | NC State ISE<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Dr. Karen Chen\u2019s research studies human performances and uses virtual reality to explore potentials in improving health and safety.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link 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