Chayen earned her first degree in pharmacy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. During her undergraduate studies, she visited the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology to learn histochemistry. She subsequently pursued MSc and PhD research at the Kennedy Institute. In 1983, Chayen submitted her thesis on stimulus-response coupling in smooth muscle cells and received a PhD from Brunel University London.
Chayen began her first postdoctoral fellowship at Imperial College London, where she studied the biophysics of muscle proteins. When her grant was not renewed, she joined the lab of David Mervyn Blow to develop novel protein crystallization techniques. There, she began her influential work of utilizing phase diagrams to optimize conditions for crystal growth.
Currently, Chayen is a professor of Biomedical Sciences and head of the Crystallization Group in Computational and Systems Medicine at Imperial College London.