Rate My Professor Yu Lin Shen

Yu-Lin Shen is a Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of New Mexico, where he has been on the faculty since 1996. He began his academic career there as an Assistant Professor from 1996 to 2001, advanced to Associate Professor from 2001 to 2006, and has been a full Professor since 2006. Prior to joining UNM, he served as a Post-doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1994 to 1996. Shen served as Chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering for nine years until July 2025, during which the department expanded from 14 to 19 full-time professors and lecturers, increased the number of women faculty from one to four, launched an online master’s program in space systems engineering, introduced undergraduate and graduate concentrations in microsystems engineering and renewable energy, and graduated approximately 740 undergraduates and 350 graduates. His educational background includes a PhD in Engineering from the Materials Science Group at Brown University in 1994, an MS in Materials Science and Engineering from National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan in 1988, and a BS in Materials Science and Engineering from the same university in 1986.

Professor Shen's research centers on numerical modeling and mechanical behavior of materials, encompassing thin films, microelectronic devices and packages, and composite materials. Specific interests include deformation and failure of heterogeneous materials and structures, micro-mechanical modeling, surface instabilities and wrinkle formation in thin films and soft structures, nanoindentation characterization of metal and ceramic multilayer coatings, thermo-mechanical reliability of microelectronic packages, and mechanical and thermal behavior of heterogeneous material systems. In 2019, he was appointed the PNM Chair for Renewable Energy Research to support studies on the mechanics and reliability of photovoltaic devices and packages. Shen was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers in 2005 and has received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award, Oak Ridge Associated Universities Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award and Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Fellow from ASME, UNM School of Engineering Junior Faculty Research Excellence Award, UNM Regents' Lectureship, UNM School of Engineering Junior Faculty Teaching Excellence Award, and Sigma Xi UNM Chapter Young Outstanding Engineer Award. He is listed among the World's Top 2% Most Influential Scientists (Career Impact) by Elsevier and Stanford University. Shen authored the book Constrained Deformation of Materials (Springer, 2010). Representative publications include "Instabilities of Thin Films on a Compliant Substrate: Direct Numerical Simulations from Surface Wrinkling to Global Buckling" (Scientific Reports, 2020), "Wrinkle, Fold, and Ridge Patterns of Thin Films Attached to a Compliant Substrate: Direct Numerical Simulations Involving Plastic Yielding" (Thin-Walled Structures, 2024), "Plasticity-Mediated Deformation Instabilities in Thin Film-Compliant Substrate Systems: Direct Three-Dimensional Simulations" (Journal of Materials Science, 2024), "Thermal Conductivity of Crack-Containing Media: A Numerical Study" (Journal of Composite Materials, 2022), and "Shear Band Formation in Thin-Film Multilayer Columns Under Compressive Loading: A Mechanistic Study" (Materials, 2025).