Dr. Chong Chen is a Senior Scientist with Tenure at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC), the Japanese national research institute for ocean research. Dr. Chen received his degrees from University of Oxford, including BA and MA (in Natural Sciences: Biological Sciences) in 2011 and DPhil (in Zoology) in 2015. Dr. Chen is a deep-sea biologist primarily working on animals inhabiting chemosynthetic ecosystems such as hydrothermal vents and hydrocarbon seeps, where he tries to document and understand biodiversity and its evolution across multiple levels: from species to ecosystem, and from phenome to genome. Living in ‘extreme’ habitats such as deep-sea hot vents require novel adaptations, and Dr. Chen is especially interested in how these help the animals adapt to their environments, as well the trajectories by which such adaptations arise. Methods he employs are wide-ranging, from electron microscopy to 3D anatomical reconstructions to live-rearing experiments to molecular and genomic analyses. Having participated in over 30 research expeditions mainly in the Western Pacific, Indian, and Southern oceans, he has experiences in sampling deep-sea animals using manned submersibles, remotely operated vehicles, and ‘classic’ gears such as beam trawls.
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