Melissa Chen is a Contributing Editor at The Spectator where she mostly writes about geopolitics and occasionally, the culture wars. She is also the co-founder and managing director of the non-profit organization Ideas Beyond Borders which focuses on making knowledge more accessible to those who speak Kurdish, Farsi, Arabic through the translation and the dissemination of books and articles. 

Born in Singapore, she has always been very vocal about the necessity of free expression and education as guarantors of human rights and democracy. With degrees in computational biology, she previously worked as a researcher at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, later finding her passion for the exchange of free ideas better suited within the non-profit sector and journalism. 

Chen co-hosts the FAIR Perspectives podcast with Angel Eduardo, which features discussions on polarizing topics alongside various authors, public intellectuals, thought leaders, and everyday people from around the world.