Yue Chen, PhD, Director of the Visual Psychophysiology Laboratory at McLean Hospital and an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, died on 24 September 2017—his 58th birthday—from pancreatic cancer.

Dr Chen was born in Dalian, China, and grew up in Wuhan and Nanjing, China. He attended the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, where he received a B.E. in electro-optical engineering in 1982 and an M.S. in optics in 1988. He came to the United States to pursue graduate work in physiological optics/vision science at the University of Houston, where he received a Ph.D. under the mentorship of Drs Harold Bedell and Laura Frishman in 1995. Dr Chen then completed a post-doctoral fellowship under the joint mentorship of Drs Philip S Holzman and Ken Nakayama at Harvard University, followed by a Research Fellowship in Psychopathology in the Psychology Research Laboratory at McLean Hospital under the mentorship of Drs Holzman, Steven Matthysse, and Deborah Levy before starting his own laboratory.

For someone who had arrived in San Francisco with only $50 and no plane ticket to Houston, Dr Chen’s professional trajectory was undoubtedly a source of great pride to him, his family, and those who studied or worked with him. The kindness of a stranger provided him with a plane ticket to Houston and the generosity of a faculty member allowed him to find living accommodations there. From this humble beginning, Dr Chen carved a distinguished professional career as a prominent neuroscientist.

Dr Chen served as an ad hoc reviewer for over 30 journals and was on the editorial board of eight. He was an ad hoc grant reviewer for the National Institutes of Health and for several European funding agencies. He was also an active member of several professional societies, including the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP), the Society for Research in Psychopathology, and the Society for International Schizophrenia Research. He served on the Membership Committee of the ACNP, the Scientific Program Committee of the International Congress of Schizophrenia Research, and the Scientific Program Committee of the European Conference of Eye Movements. Since 2000, his work was consistently funded by the NIMH, Autism Speaks, and private and intramural funding sources. He mentored research assistants, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows, all of whom have pursued research careers.

Dr Chen published over 60 peer-reviewed empirical papers and review articles. Much of his scientific work focused on visual motion perception and the neural processes associated with it in schizophrenia. His research showed that visual motion processing, a critical sensory mechanism mediated in the extrastriate cortex, was deficient in schizophrenia patients and their biological relatives. In studying the neural basis of visual motion perception, he found hypoactivity in the middle temporal area and hyperactivity in a prefrontal cortical area, suggesting possible trans-cortical reorganization of neural activations in schizophrenia. In later work on face perception, he identified an association between perceptual deficits and impaired affect recognition of facial images in schizophrenia patients, with implications for compromised social functioning in this disorder. In recent years, he had extended his research to include visual processing and face recognition in autism. Dr Chen and his colleagues found enhanced local processing of dynamic visual information in adolescents with autism, providing new support for the long-held hypothesis of enhanced perceptual processing in this neurodevelopmental disorder, and highlighted the potential of an intervention strategy to improve perceptual function in patients with autism spectrum disorder.

Dr Chen is survived by his wife, Kelly Liu, and their two children, Langston and Katarina.