Irene A. Chen is an associate professor in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles. Previously, she was an assistant and then associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received a B.A. in chemistry and an M.D.-Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard, advised by Jack Szostak, and was a Bauer Fellow in systems biology at Harvard. She has received the Searle Scholar award, NIH New Innovator award, the Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar award, and the David White award for outstanding contribution in astrobiology. She has been a Simons Investigator for the Collaboration on the Origin of Life since 2013. Her laboratory studies life-like biochemical systems to understand their fundamental properties and address emerging challenges in biotechnology and infectious disease. Their focus is biomolecular design and evolution in two nanoscale systems: simple synthetic cells and bacteriophages (phages).