Annette Hillers-Chen was born in Moenchengladbach, Germany, in 1978. She studied psychology at the University of Heidelberg from 1997-2004, including a one-year Fulbright exchange program at the University of Illinois from 2000-2001. She has been working as a lecturer at Nanjing University since 2004, andstarting from 2006she simultaneously worked on her Ph.D. degree funded by the German National Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes e.V.) at Heidelberg University, where she graduated in January 2009.