Chang Wen Chen received B.S. degree in electrical engineering from University of Science and Technology of China in 1983, M.S.E.E. degree from University of Southern California, Los Angeles in 1986, and Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1992.

He has been Allen S. Henry Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Florida Institute of Technology since July 2003. Previously, he was on the faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Missouri-Columbia from 1996 to 2003 and at the University of Rochester from 1992 to 1996. From September 2000 to October 2002, he served as the Head of the Interactive Media Group at the David Sarnoff Research Laboratories in Princeton, NJ. He has also consulted with Kodak Research Labs, Microsoft Research, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. He has received research awards from NSF, NASA, DARPA, and the Whitaker Foundation. He also received the Sigma Xi Excellence in Graduate Research Mentoring Award from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2003. Two of his Ph.D. students have received Best Paper Awards in visual communication and medical imaging, respectively.

He is the Editor-in-Chief for IEEE Trans. Circuits and Systems for Video Technology starting January 2006. He has been an Associate Editor for IEEE Trans. Multimedia from 2002 to 2005 and for IEEE Trans. Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (CSVT) from 1997 to 2005. He has also been on the editorial board of IEEE MultiMedia Magazine from 2003 to 2005 and an editor for the Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation since 2000. He has been a Guest Editor for IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communications special issue on Error-Resilient Image and Video Transmission, a Guest Editor for IEEE Trans. CSVT special issue on Wireless Video, a Guest Editor for Journal of Wireless Communication and Mobile Computing special issue on Multimedia over Mobile IP, a Guest Editor for the journal Signal Processing: Image Communications special issue on Recent Advances in Wireless Video, and a Guest Editor for Journal of Visual Communication and Image Representation special issue on Visual Communication in the Ubiquitous Era. He has also served in the technical program committee of numerous IEEE and other international conferences. He is Chair of the Technical Program Committee for ICME2006 to be held in Toronto, Canada. He was elected an IEEE Fellow in 2004 for his contributions in digital image and video processing, analysis, and communications.