Joyce Chen joined the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at The Ohio State University in 2022. Previously, she was on faculty with Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics, where she started as an Assistant Professor in 2007, received tenure in 2017, and was promoted to Professor in 2022. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. Joyce is a development and labor economist with research interests in migration, climate resilience, human capital, and diversity, equity and inclusion. She holds a courtesy appointment in the Department of Economics and is a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) and a Faculty Affiliate at the Institute for Population Research, the Sustainability Institute, and the Mershon Center for International Security Studies.

Her research focuses on understanding the complex relationships between livelihoods, migration, climate change, and development. She has addressed fundamental issues in economics, including asymmetric information and imperfect commitment, the role of preferences in human capital investments, resilience to environmental shocks and climate change, and nuanced patterns of selection into migration. More recently, Joyce has also taken the initiative to diversify her research by blending it with her service and entrepreneurial activities in diversity, equity, and inclusion.