She works in Japan as the provost of the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology,[1] where she is also a professor and head of the Micro/Bio/Nanofluidics Unit.
[2] Shen was a student of engineering mechanics in a special class for the gifted at Hunan University in Changsha, China, where she received a bachelor's degree in 1992.
She received a second master's degree there in 1996, in civil and environmental engineering, and then completed her Ph.D. in theoretical and applied mechanics in 2000.
In 2014 she moved to her present position at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology, continuing to hold an adjunct professor affiliation at the University of Washington.
[4] Shen was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) in 2021, after a nomination from the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics, "for contributions to our understanding of bifurcations and instabilities in flows of complex fluids at small length scales, and for the design of ingenious microfluidic experiments".