Professor Chen’s research goal is to impact our society through scientific discoveries and sustainable technological innovations. His research interest thus lies in nanomaterial innovations, particularly hybrid nanomaterials featuring rich interfaces, for sustainable energy and environment. His approach is to combine multidisciplinary experiments with first-principles calculations to design and discover novel nanomaterials for engineering various sensing and energy devices with superior performance. The chemical and biological sensors address the current unmet need for low-cost, real-time, sensitive and selective detection of a wide range of analytes attractive for innovation at nexus of food-energy-water systems (INFEWS), smart and connected health (SCH), smart and connected communities (SCC), Internet of Things (IoT), and next-generation smart and resilient infrastructures, through interfacing with smart phones and terminals loaded with machine-learning, big-data analytics. The energy devices, such as lithium-ion batteries, supercapacitors, solar cells and fuel cells, address the current need for cost-effective, high-performance production and storage of renewable energy and are attractive for future sustainable energy and environment systems. His research also attempts to address the low-cost, scalable nanomanufacturing of such sensor and energy devices through additive manufacturing technologies such as 3D printing. For more details, please visit his research group website at http://www.uwm.edu/nsee. Most of his research projects are at the convergent intersection of interesting fundamental science and industrial applications with ample opportunities for new discoveries, which creates an excellent vehicle for educating students. Prof. Chen also is a pioneer in technology translation and commercialization through exemplary industrial partnership and the university start-up company.