Huili Chen is a cross-disciplinary researcher, scientist, and designer, holding a PhD in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT Media Lab. She is currently a Presidential Research Fellow in the Program in Cognitive Science at Princeton University (2024-2025). She was a 2023-2024 Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society.

Huili’s research is at the intersection of human-computer interaction, cognitive science, and human-centered AI, integrating theories and methods from Computer Science, Psychology, and Design. At Princeton, she works on building the theoretical development and empirical testing of studying human and artificial minds, exploring what it means for intelligent machines to understand and how humans evaluate explanations from human versus machine sources.

She has received best paper awards and nominations at top Human-Computer Interaction conferences (e.g., ACM HRI and ICMI), and her research has been featured in MIT News, Asparagus Magazine, and the CODAME Art + Tech Festival. Huili has been awarded Forbes China's 30 Under 30, the Learning Innovation Fellowship at the MIT Media Lab, among other global accolades.