SDSU Climate Informatics Laboratory

About Dr. Samuel Shen

Dr. Shen is Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at San Diego State University and Visiting Research Mathematician at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UCSD. He received his B.Sc. in Engineering Mechanics in 1982 from the Nanjing University of Science and Technology, and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985 and 1987, respectively.

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, and University of Tokyo.

His main research areas are global climate change and nonlinear waves. He has published 3 books and over 100 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 was awarded the US National Research Council's Senior Fellowship and the honor of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Well-known Overseas Chinese Scholar.