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Dr. Chen is an attending anesthesiologist, who specializes in regional anesthesia here at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in the Department of Anesthesiology, Perioperative and Pain Medicine. She grew up in Maryland and Texas, received a B.S. in Biochemistry at the University of Maryland at College Park, and worked for two years at the NIH before attending the University of Vermont for Medical school after much encouragement from her research mentors. Dr. Chen returned to Maryland for her internship to be closer to family before joining BWH for her anesthesiology residency and fellowship in regional anesthesia. She was awarded ‘Distinguished Resident’ (2020) and ‘Fellow of the Year’ (2021), respectively, and she joined the BWH Anesthesia Clinical Faculty in 2021. Dr. Chen’s long-term career goal is to become an independent physician-scientist and leader in the field of academic anesthesiology with a focus on how to personalize and optimize a patient’s experience with regional anesthesia.
Dr. Chen first became interested in science and research in high school. She was accepted to a Summer Intramural Research Training Award (IRTA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2005 under the direction of Dr. Joshua Farber, MD, studying the role of CXCL16 and prostate cancer. Dr. Chen found research incredibly enjoyable and continued to pursue her research interests in college in a bioorganic research lab studying electron transfer in DNA. She was awarded a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Undergraduate Research Fellowship between 2008-2010. Post-college, Dr. Chen was deciding between medicine and research and was accepted to the NIH Post-baccalaureate IRTA program to work with Dr. Amy Klion, MD in a translational research laboratory, studying hypereosinophilia. She ultimately decided to pursue a medical degree with the hopes of becoming a physician-scientist. After deciding to pursue a career in Anesthesiology, Dr. Chen has combined her concerns for opioid use disorders, her interest in medical education for patients and trainees, and the advances in regional anesthesia in hopes of providing safe multimodal anesthesia and analgesia, to patients undergoing surgical procedures.
During residency, she was mentored by Dr. Vesela Kovacheva, where she helped extract hemodynamic data on patients undergoing cesarean section with spinal anesthesia. She also reviewed how anxiety and anesthesia may be related, publishing a scoping review titled “Less Stress, Better Success: A Scoping Review on the Effects of Anxiety on Anesthetic and Analgesic Consumption.” She was also mentored by Dr. Alex Arriaga to pursue her interest in medical education through a mixed-methods research project looking at data-driven didactics and how providing data with residents could be helpful. This work was published in the Journal of Clinical Anesthesia titled “Education based on publicly-available keyword data is associated with decreased stress and improved trajectory of in-training exam performance.” Under the mentorship of Dr. Kristin Schreiber, she has published a narrative review in Anaesthesia titled “The role of regional anaesthesia and multimodal analgesia in the prevention of chronic post-surgical pain.” Her research and interest in regional anesthesia ultimately led her to pursue a fellowship in Regional Anesthesia and Acute Pain.
Dr. Chen loves what she does and states, “if there is a way to help relieve a person’s perioperative pain especially with a regional anesthetic technique, I want to.” During her fellowship, she conducted a randomized trial in healthy volunteers to assess how different combinations and doses of local anesthetics could affect pressure pain in a human model of compartment syndrome. She recently published her original research in Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine titled “Impact of Varying Degrees of Peripheral Nerve Blockade on Experimental Pressure and Ischemic Pain: Adductor Canal and Sciatic Nerve Blocks in a Human Model of Compartment Syndrome Pain.”
Stemming from the qualitative data looking at how healthy volunteers from the compartment syndrome study experience nerve blocks, Dr. Chen’s current project is looking at whether or not patients with high or low pain catastrophizing may benefit from titrated sedation versus intraprocedural reassurance and education when receiving a nerve block. Can we help improve the experience by looking at how people experience procedural pain? She hopes this will provide clinical changes to how we deliver regional anesthesia to our patients as we continue to personalize medicine for individuals receiving surgery. Dr. Chen is passionate and cares a great deal about leading projects to help address these issues in addition to teaching others. When Dr. Chen does get a chance to take some time off, she loves spending time with her family and friends as well as travelling and trying all kinds of food.
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