Professor Chia has been an academic and clinician with University of Malaya since 1987 and continues to be the Honorary Professor at that institution before joining Sunway University. She was previously heading the Department of Primary Care Medicine and was responsible for starting the Master in Family Medicine at UM in 1989, the first training program in Family Medicine back then. She continues to be very active in teaching and training of doctors especially as she proposed and started the first of its kind Postgraduate Diploma in Primary Care for the Elderly at Sunway University in 2020 with the inaugural batch having graduated successfully. Part of the reason for her interest in care of older adults is attributed to the time she spent at University of Cambridge on a Commonwealth Medical Fellowship offered by UK looking at issues associated with an ageing population, particularly from the medical and health aspect.

Her research interest and expertise is very much on hypertension and its related cardiovascular diseases. She lead the Malaysian Society of Hypertension as its president for several years and has conducted many research as well as educational projects on hypertension. She continues her research and policy/consensus work with a team of hypertension experts in Asia called the Hypertension Cardiovascular Outcome Prevention, Evidence in Asia (HOPE-Asia) Network on optimising management of hypertension to reduce adverse fatal ad non-fatal cardiovascular events.