Prof. Marcus Chen

Biography

Professor Chen's career began conventionally enough at MIT, where he studied phase transitions in materials science. His pivot came when he noticed that humans exhibit similar 'threshold behaviors'—the moment one decides to finally reply to an email, or the precise instant a 'quick break' becomes procrastination. He now leads our interdisciplinary Threshold Studies program, which has produced groundbreaking work on 'the point of no return in snack consumption.'

Research Interests

• Human threshold behaviors and tipping points
• Phase transitions in decision-making
• The phenomenology of 'one more episode'
• Procrastination boundary conditions
• Email response latency modeling

Selected Publications

• Threshold Dynamics in Human Behavior: From Physics to Psychology (Princeton University Press, 2017)
• The Snooze Button Problem: Modeling Sleep Threshold Violations
• When 'Quick' Becomes 'Long': Temporal Threshold Perception in Break-Taking
• Phase Diagrams of Procrastination: A Materials Science Approach
• The Netflix Threshold: Binge-Watching as a Critical Phenomenon

Education

• Ph.D., Materials Science and Engineering MIT, 1995
• M.Eng., Applied Physics Stanford University, 1991
• B.Sc., Physics National Taiwan University, 1989