Annie Chen is a designer, scientist, and socio-technical researcher based in the United States.
Her work explores how environmental technologies encounter human and living systems across the climate transition. She develops artifacts and systems that make these encounters legible, enabling new forms of collective sense-making across science, technology, and community life.
After graduating from the Brown|RISD Dual Degree Program, she co-founded BEAM, a research-led creative studio for people & planet. She is also a Research Affiliate at the MIT Media Lab’s Community Biotechnology Initiative and a member of NEW INC, the New Museum’s design, culture, and tech incubator, in the Year 12 Creative Science cohort.
Her work has been supported by NASA Ames Research Center, MIT Media Lab, Science History Institute,
New York Foundation for the Arts, Brown University, EY Intelligent Realities Lab, and more.
CV
Selected Projects
🌀1 ASILOMAR
🌀2 TIDELANDS 2100
🌀3 CIVIC BIOTECHNOLOGY
🌀4 EATING THE WHOLE FISH
🌀5 NASA AMES
🌀6 BEACONS
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Civic Biotechnology
Researcher
MIT Media Lab
2026Growing Community Power in Conservation
Team: Annie Chen, Dr. David S. Kong, Zoe Lee, Zion Michael
Partners: Harvard Kennedy School, Revive & Restore (+more)
Read More
As coral reefs rapidly die in warming waters, new biotechnologies are racing to save them — from probiotics to gene-edited corals. But most never leave the lab. Without ways to partner with the communities who permit and steward reef ecosystems, critical interventions stall before they reach the ocean.
With the MIT Media Lab’s Community Biotechnology Initiative, we developed a Sociotechnical Toolkit for listening, mapping relationships, and organizing collective action in conservation. To share these methods broadly, we built Civic Biotechnology — a live site that makes the tools accessible to the scientific community and adaptable for real-world use. More than a manual, it’s a resource for integrating trust-building into research and deployment.
Civic Biotechnology will launch online in winter 2025, offering scientists an open-access platform for applying these methods in their own work. Field deployment begins in Jamaica and Micronesia in 2026, with continued development through the Geneva Science and Diplomacy Anticipator (GESDA) to link local practice with global governance.
Full list of partners: Revive & Restore, Parley for the Oceans, Harvard Kennedy School, Practicing Democracy Project, Coral Gardeners, One People One Reef, Alligator Head Foundation.