Rate My Professor Junliang Shen

Junliang Shen is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Yale University, specializing in algebraic geometry. He joined Yale's Department of Mathematics in 2021 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in July 2025. Prior to Yale, Shen was a C. L. E. Moore Instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 2018 to 2021. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Peking University in 2013 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from ETH Zürich in 2018, advised by Rahul Pandharipande. Shen's research centers on algebraic geometry and its connections to topology, enumerative geometry, and mathematical physics. His work addresses key problems such as the cohomology of moduli spaces of sheaves and Higgs bundles, Hitchin fibrations, perverse filtrations, algebraic cycles, and the P=W conjecture. He employs tools from algebraic geometry to solve longstanding conjectures in these areas, including contributions to the topology of Lagrangian fibrations and hyper-Kähler varieties.

Shen's groundbreaking contributions include resolving the P=W conjecture for GL_n in collaboration with Davesh Maulik, published in the Annals of Mathematics (2024, volume 200, issue 2). Other major publications feature 'Perverse filtrations and Fourier transforms' in Acta Mathematica (2025, volume 234, number 1), 'The D-equivalence conjecture for hyper-Kähler varieties via hyperholomorphic bundles' in Inventiones Mathematicae (2025, volume 241), 'Hitchin fibrations, abelian surfaces, and the P=W conjecture' in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society (2022, volume 35, issue 3), and 'On the intersection cohomology of the moduli of SL_n-Higgs bundles on a curve' in the Journal of Topology (2022, volume 15, issue 3). He has received the 2024 Sloan Research Fellowship, the 2024–25 Arthur Greer Memorial Prize from Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the David Mumford Best Paper Award in Algebraic Geometry from the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians (2024), and the SwissMAP Innovator Prize (2018). Shen holds NSF grants (DMS-2000726/2134315 and DMS-2301474) and mentors graduate students while delivering invited lectures internationally.