Yu-Chien (Alice) Chien is the Director of Lasers, Flames & Aerosols and associate project scientist at UCI. She served in realtime remote operations on earth for NASA E-FIELD Flames boarded the international space station (ISS). She led the microgravity experiment operations in 2018 with the NASA GRC.
She is currently the principal investigator for NASA µg E-FIELD Flames for datamining the insights of the valuable experiment data from the PSI system. Her first in-depth aerospace teamwork experience was in 2002 building a plane in the UAV Lab. as Aerospace Engineer undergraduate. Her first combustion project experience was in 2004. She continued as an experimentalist through her M.S in Aeronautics and Astronautics, Ph.D. in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and up until now.
Chien is the official advisor for graduate research thesis/dissertation, and undergraduate projects/individual research. She devotes herself to bridging the gap between conventional course work ↔ academic research for Grad/UG education with various curricula she created. She also serves as the Director of the W.M. Keck Foundation DOPSL (Deep Ocean Power Science Laboratory) for hydrate research.
She is now focusing on ADEI (Anti-racism, Diversity, Equality and Inclusion) and serves as the faculty PI for the UCI CAMP (California Alliance for Minority Participation) program and SWE-UCI counselor (Society of Women Engineers).
Research Interests: Microgravity Electric Field Flames, Methane Hydrate Combustion and Emission, CO2 Sequestration, Aerosols and Spray Imaging using Holography Reconstruction Techniques