Svetlana Chen is a physicist and urban systems researcher whose work bridges atmospheric science and everyday infrastructure. Raised in Vladivostok and Vancouver, she earned a BSc in physics from the University of British Columbia (2005) and a PhD in atmospheric physics from the University of Chicago (2012). After postdoctoral research with NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratories, she led an urban data group at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology and later founded OpenTerrace, a nonprofit supporting community environmental sensing. Since 2020 she has served as an associate professor at the University of Toronto's School of Cities and Department of Physics, focusing on urban heat fluxes, low-cost spectrometry, and timekeeping networks. Her fieldwork has logged rooftop temperatures in Phoenix, mapped light pollution in Seoul, and collaborated with UN-Habitat on public night-sky initiatives. Her essays have appeared in Nature, Wired, and Aeon.
