Dr. Baoya Chen is a Boya Distinguished Professor in the Division of Humanities at Peking University. He is also a doctoral advisor and Editor-in-Chief of the academic journal Essays on Linguistics. Dr. Chen’s areas of research include theoretical linguistics, language contact, historical linguistics, and language geography.

Furthermore, Dr. Chen has spent years researching the Tea-Horse Road. His major research achievements include the discovery and naming of the Tea-Horse Road (in cooperation with other scholars), the Self-Organization and Harmonization Language Model, the Cognitive Reductionist Model of Linguistic Units and Linguistic Rules, and the Unbounded Ordered Language Contact Model. Dr. Chen has published numerous works, including Research into the Tea-Horse Road, Cultural Linguistic Theory, Language Contact and Language Union, Chinese Linguistic Methodology in the 20th Century, and Contemporary Linguistics. Dr. Chen has also secured funding for the following major projects of National Social Science Fund of China (NSSFC) from the National Office for Philosophy and Social Sciences: Research on Modeling Language Evolution and the Types of Language Contact Based on Chinese Languages and Dialects and Research on the Co-Evolution of Chinese National Music Culture and the Integration of Pertinent Data. Dr. Chen has received numerous awards, including the PKU National Outstanding Scholar Award, the PKU Teaching Achievement Award, first prize in the Beijing Office of Philosophy and Social Sciences Outstanding Achievement Awards, first prize in the National Teaching Achievement Awards, and has twice won first prize in the Wang Li Linguistics Awards.