Born in the sunny island Singapore, Siong Chen came to the less sunny island of Great Britain to study chemistry at the University of Cambridge. He continued with a MPhil in Biophysics there under the supervision of Professor Ulrich Keyser, where he worked on extending solid-state nanopore sensing to the detection of RNA structural modifications and DNA triplexes. He joined the Benesch group in January 2024 as a DPhil student characterising of novel coral small heat shock proteins and using them to quantify the chemical principles of protein evolution.