Chen Wei is an assistant professor of computer science (Fall 2025) in Rice University's Department of Computer Science. Her research lies at the intersection of machine learning and computer vision, with the goal of developing flexible and general-purpose intelligent systems. To this end, she focuses on how to encode enormously complex raw visual signals to structured representations that are easier for machines to process and understand; she also aims to connect visual representations to knowledge bases like large language models to achieve higher-order cognition.