Dr. Chien is the Chair of the Security Committee of the Peer to Peer Working Group, a member of that organization's Technical Architecture Council, and was formerly a member of the Steering Committee. Additionally, Dr. Chien furthers the objectives of the Global Grid Forum as a member of its Steering Committee. Dr. Chien is the Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC) chair professor in the department of computer science and engineering at the University of California at San Diego. He has also held joint appointments with both the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure (NPACI), working on large-scale clusters. At the NCSA, Dr. Chien designed the tightly coupled NT Supercluster in 1998, a 256-processor system, which at that time was the largest commodity software and hardware based computing system in the world.

From 1990 to 1998, Dr. Chien was a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he held appointments at the NCSA and the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering. During his tenure at the University of Illinois, Dr. Chien built a successful research program involving more than 15 people. His work garnered millions of dollars of research support from four federal agencies and numerous companies (Intel, Microsoft, Compaq/Tandem, ATT, Hewlett Packard, Myricom, Packet Engines), based on his high impact, practically significant work on distributed computing, networking, network interfaces, and object-oriented programming.

Dr. Chien is also a contributing author to The Grid: Blueprint for a New Generation Computing Infrastructure.

Dr. Chien received his S.B. in Electrical Engineering in 1984, his S.M. in Computer Science in 1987, and his Sc.D. in Computer Science in 1990, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.