Dr. Shen is Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at San Diego State University (SDSU) and Visiting Research Mathematician at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD. He directs the SDSU Climate Informatics Lab (SCIL) found in 2006. He served as the SDSU department chair of Mathematics and Statistics from 2006 to 2011. Formerly, Dr. Shen was McCalla Professor of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences at the University of Alberta, Canada, and President of the Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society. He also held a variety of visiting positions at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, US Climate Prediction Center,
His main research areas are data science/machine learning, climate science, and nonlinear waves. He has published 5 books and over 130 research papers in top journals, including Nature-Geoscience. He developed the spectral optimal averaging (SOA) theory, ensemble canonical correlation analysis (ECCA), and several other mathematical methods to accurately quantify the uncertainties in the global warming assessment and to make reliable climate predictions. He has filed a US patent on the spectral optimal gridding of space-time data. Many news media reported his research and inventions, including New York Times, New Scientist, and NASA Top Story. Dr. Shen won the US National Research Council's Senior Fellowship and the honor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Well-known Overseas Chinese Scholar.