Dr. Tsangyao (T.Y.) Chen attended National Taipei Teachers College (then Taiwan Provincial Taipei Normal College) in Taipei, Taiwan. After serving for three years, Dr. Chen pursued a Master of Education degree at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio and then went to Phenom Penn, Cambodia to work as an educational specialist for Taipei Overseas Peace Service (TOPS), where he implemented a train-the-trainer teacher training model and founded the monthly newsletter Educational Reform before going back to Ohio University to complete his doctorate in Instructional Technology.

During the course of his doctoral program, Dr. Chen took the positions of Technology Specialist and then Assistant Director for Information Systems. After completing his doctorate, Dr. Chen went back to Taiwan and worked as a project consultant at the Institute of Information Industry (III) in policy research, learning technology development, and industry consulting. Dr. Chen participated in the planning of digital infrastructure at various levels and later, through this involvement, contributed to the creation of e-learning standards and evaluation frameworks.

Dr. Chen later joined Chung Yuan University as an assistant professor for management information systems. During this tenure, Dr. Chen was voted as the Best Advisor twice and developed his research streams in the domains of online learning and ontological engineering. In addition, Dr. Chen managed international programs for the university and the Ministry of Education, and helped initiated the annual Taiwan Higher Education (THE) Fair and the bilateral Higher Education Forum (HEF) in the ASEAN countries.

In 2016, Dr. Chen came to Florida State University (FSU) on a research leave and stayed for his second doctorate in information science with a focus on how cognitive and social biases affect online health decision-making and the design of theory-based HCI components for debiasing. At FSU, Dr. Chen taught Information Systems and Services (Linux, Bash, MySQL, & PM/ITIL) as a lead instructor and Database Management and Business Intelligence (BI) as a Teaching Faculty. Dr. Chen later switched to work as a researcher implementing the Harvard Dataverse research data repository system for the university's Health Data Science Initiative (HDSI) project and as a research technology specialist at the Research Computing Center.

Dr. Chen currently serves as an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Business and Information Technology at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T).