Professor Hualan Chen

Educational background
Hualan Chen studied veterinary medicine as her undergraduate and graduate majors in Gansu Agricultural University, receiving her graduate degree in 1994. In 1997, she received her PhD from the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS). She performed three years postdoctoral research at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States from 1999-2002.

Research Area
Hualan Chen is a young virologist whose research focus is the study of influenza and the development of vaccines against this virus. She was offered a professorship in 2002 at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute of CAAS and was appointed as the Director of the National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory.

Hualan Chen has developed a series of vaccines for H5N1 avian influenza and over 100 billion doses of the vaccines have been used in China and other countries, including Vietmam, Mongolia, and Egypt. She also performs extensive basic research to understand the evolution and the genetic basis of the virulence and host range of H5N1 avian influenza viruses and has published many papers on avian influenza research in international, peer-reviewed journals, including Science, PNAS, PLoS Pathogens and Journal of Virology.

She is best known for researching animal epidemic diseases. She is a member of the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) and a member of the Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database (FAOSTAT). She is now a researcher and PhD Supervisor at Harbin Veterinary Research Institute of Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. She has been listed among the "Ten Scientific Figures of the Year" by Nature in 2013. She won the L'Oréal-UNESCO Awards for Women in Science in 2016, and was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2017.