Phoebe has been awarded 30 research grants around 8 millions (include 13 prestigious Australia Research Council (ARC) Grants) so far. Recently, Phoebe just received one ARC Discovery project from 2013 -2015. Phoebe received one ARC Centre of Excellence in Bioinformatics as project leader and chief investigator from 2008-2010; 2003-2007, ARC Discovery - Exploiting Database Technologies for the Visualization and Analysis of Measured and Simulated Plant Structures in Bioinformatics as a sole Chief Investigator (CI) and one ARC Linkage-International - Development of Knowledge Discovery for High Dimensional Biomedical Data 2004 round and from 2005-2007. Phoebe is also the Principal Chief Investigator (CI) and Project Leader for an ARC large Discovery Grant (Previous ARC Large) on Integrating Database Technologies and Visual Analysis in Bioinformatics for Genome Data. Phoebe is also CI and QUT Manager of an ARC Large Linkage-Infrastructure grant on Computational infrastructure for high-throughput genome bioinformatics. She is a sole CI of ARC Linkage Project Grant on Design and Development of a Web-based Intelligent Multimedia Mining System. She is also a CI of successful ARC Centre in Bioinformatics. Prof. Chen is also three ARC Network Seeding Grants CIs. Most of them are in Bioinformatics and Multimedia field.

Her research interests include bioinformatics, multimedia technologies, and Information Systems. She presented her research results at various international and national conferences, and has published more than 200 refereed publications since 1999. They appear in high standing publications, such as Nucleic Acids Research, BMC Genomics, BMC Bioinformatics, Current Drug Metabolism, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Information Systems, IEEE Multimedia, ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications etc. Phoebe is an editor for several journal issues and proceedings, such as IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Current Bioinformatics, BMC Genomics (2012-2015), BMC Bioinformatics (2009-2011, 2013-2015), BMC Systems Biology (2013-2015), IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (2013-2015), Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (since 2003), International Multimedia Modelling Conference (since 2003). She is the author of the book Bioinformatics Technologies (Springer) that was published in Jan 2005.

She also participates in various professional activities for the above research areas. Phoebe is ACM SIG MM Vice Chair from 2021-2023. She is a founder of the Asia-Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (and the Chair of the steering committee).  She is also a steering committee Chair for International Multimedia Modelling Conference (MMM). Phoebe is the area Chair in the ACM Multimedia conference 2015 (ACM MM2015), the program Chair of the Ninth Asia Pacific Bioinformatics Conference (APBC2011), and conference co-chair of the Third International Workshop on Conceptual Modelling for Life Sciences Applications (CMLSA 2010), and the 16th International Conference on Multimedia Modelling (MMM2010). She is the guest editor for a number of journals, including BMC Genomics (2012-2015), BMC Bioinformatics, (2009-2011, 2013-2015), BMC Systems Biology (2013-2015), IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics (2013-2015), Computational Biology and Chemistry (2013-2015), BBA - Proteins and Proteomics (2013), etc. She is also the editorial board member of IEEE Transactions on Multimedia (T-MM), Current Bioinformatics, International Journal of Intelligent Computing in Medical Sciences and Image Processing, Journal of Research and Practice in Information Technology (JRPIT), etc. She is also a program committee member for many international/national conferences, such as PAKDD2015, DEXA2015, PAKDD2014, RECOMB2014, SDM2014, DEXA2014, PAKDD2013, APBC2013, RECOMB2013, ISMB2012, ICDM2011. Phoebe is a regular reviewer for a number of international journals and conferences, including Bioinformatics, Nucleic Acids Research, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Information Sciences, Journal of Internet Technology, IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, Multimedia Tools and Applications, Asia-Pacific BioTech News, Journal of Visualization Language and Computing, ISMB, PAKDD, etc.

Before Phoebe joined La Trobe University, Phoebe was an Associate Professor (Reader) at the School of Information Technology, Faculty of Science and Technology, Deakin University  Melbourne Campus Australia from Dec 2003 to April 2010.  Phoebe was the Group Leader of Bioinformatics Research and Multimedia Information Retrieval group leader. Phoebe was the Director of Research (Associate Head of Research) of School of Information Technology Deakin University from 2004-2005 and was head of Multimedia Stream from 2004 to 2006. Phoebe has been a Associate Lecturer, Lecturer and Senior Lecturer at the School of Information Systems, Faculty of Information Technology at Queensland University of Technology from Jul 1999 to Nov 2003. In this position, she has been a unit coordinator and lecturer in Interactivity Design, Multimedia Systems, and Advanced Multimedia Technologies. Dr. Chen was a Postgraduate Project Coordinator including honours and master. She was involved in the Cooperative Information Systems Research Centre in the Faculty of Information Technology as an operation manager, researcher/investigator and as its web administrator/master. She has been an active researcher in the Centre for Information Technology Innovation. She has supervised PhD, Master by Research, Honours and other projects students. She was also a web administrator/master for the School of Information Systems. She has established Advanced Bioinformatics Research Lab in QUT.