Changwen Chen is currently a Chair Professor of Visual Computing at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Previously, he served as an Empire Innovation Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, from 2008 to 2021, and as Dean of the School of Science and Engineering at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, from 2017 to 2020. His earlier roles include the Allen Henry Endowed Chair Professorship at the Florida Institute of Technology and faculty positions at the University of Missouri-Columbia and the University of Rochester.

A distinguished researcher, Chen has chaired several major conferences in multimedia video communications and signal processing. His work has been supported by organizations such as NSF, DARPA, and Microsoft. He is a Fellow of IEEE and SPIE, and a member of Academia Europaea.