Ingfei Chen, Senior contributing editor


Ingfei Chen has witnessed the hope and hype and miracles and failings of medical care and scientific research during more than 15 years of covering both areas as a journalist. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, she started her career as a general assignment reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle but shifted to the medical beat at Time Inc.'s Hippocrates and Health magazines. As a freelancer, her work has been published in The New York Times , Discover , Reader's Digest , and CR , a magazine for cancer survivors. Chen has a B.S. in biology from Brown University and an M.A. in journalism from Stanford University. She was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2004-2005 and has been a lecturer in the graduate science writing program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Chen's awareness of the challenges of aging was heightened when she worked as a contributing editor in 2002-2004 for Science Magazine's Science of Aging Knowledge Environment, a website about gerontology research. Her own mother and father live in the same New York City neighborhood where she grew up. Now approaching their 80s, they play tennis twice a week and walk to the grocery store or library every day. Chen regularly checks in with them by phone and bugs them to go to the doctor when necessary.