Ten fun facts about Zhongzhou Chen (Chen), the “learning plumber”.

  1. His name: His father gave him the name “Zhongzhou” （重周） from a famous piece of ancient Chinese literature. His father also taught him English from a very young age hoping that he will one day study in an English speaking country.
    • Clearly his dad wasn’t very consistent on those two things …. So now he tells everyone to just call him “Chen” for simplicity.
  2. His Research: Chen started to do computational biophysics as a PhD student. He soon got tired of coding before a screen all day and switched to physics education because it has more connection with human. As a physics education researcher, Chen is highly focused on educational data mining, learning analytics, online and blended learning, and recently Generative AI and LLMs.
    • He now loves coding before a screen all day analyzing student behavior from data. Inconsistency runs in his family it seems.
  3. His Education: Chen was trained as a Lighting and Illumination Engineer in Fudan University in Shanghai. His undergraduate thesis was on designing a self-feedback device to control the light output of an LED. At the same time, he published two papers working on theoretical calculations of vortex lattice structure in Bose-Einstein condensates (which he still don’t understand till this day). He also started doing stand-up comedy (相声) as a student. In 2005 Chen started his PhD at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, first working on computational biophysics, then on Physics Education and Multi-media learning. He also co-founded one of the most successful Chinese stand-up comedy groups (相声社) in North America at the time. In 2013, Chen started his postdoc at MIT, working under the mentorship of Dave Pritchard, and worked on AB experiments in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). He quickly became a core member of the Chinese standup comedy club in Boston area (浮云社), and wrote several comedy scripts.
    • In a parallel universe, Chen was one of the most successful stand-up comedian in China, and makes a lot more money than he does right now, oh well….