Dr. Shen worked in the Department of Physics at Peking University as a lecturer of physics from 1990 to 1992.  In 1992, he was offered a research position in the Institute of Semiconductors, the Chinese Academy of Sciences to further his research at Peking University.

In the winter of 1992, the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) awarded him a JSPS Fellowship to conduct research in the Department of Physics at Tohoku University, Japan for 12 months. In order to accomplish the research project, JSPS awarded him another 12-month JSPS fellowship in 1993. In the experiments, he found the optical switch as fast as 10^-13 second in the CdTe nanocrystals, which is very important to the advanced optical communication and other applications. He was invited to join Tohoku University as a permanent faculty in the Department of Physics in 1994.

In 1996, Dr. Shen received the Harada Science Research Award in Japan for outstanding contribution to science and technology.

In the spring of 2001, Professor Eric Mazur at Harvard University invited Dr. Shen to collaborate on research on the interaction between light and condensed matter, a project he has been working on for more than five years.

Dr. Shen has published more than 70 papers in physics and other science journals. He has served as a referee for Physical Review B, Journal of Physics: Condensed Matters, Nanotechnology, Semiconductor Science and Technology, Applied Physics Letters, and Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.

In September 2006, he resigned his faculty position at Tohoku University and joined UMass Lowell to further develop nanomanufacturing techniques using intense femtosecond laser pulses together with students and fellow researchers.

In addition to research work, he has experience teaching and leading experiments for undergraduate and graduate students in China, Japan and United States.