Qun Shen

Director, Photon Division

Qun Shen was appointed Director of the Photon Division in the Photon Sciences Directorate in 2010. He first came to Brookhaven Lab in 2008 as Experimental Facilities Division Director for the National Synchrotron Light Source II Project.

Prior to that, Shen was a Senior Physicist at Argonne National Laboratory and Head of the X-ray Microscopy and Imaging Group, managing an annual operating budget of $5 million and leading a twenty-five-plus-person group that operates six synchrotron beamlines in x-ray imaging and microscopy at the Advanced Photon Source (APS). In addition, he led a three-year laboratory-directed R&D project with more than $1.5 million on the Argonne Consortium on coherent diffraction imaging, and a two-year APS initiative to design and construct a new advanced x-ray imaging beamline at 32-ID. Shen also held two Adjunct Professorships, one in Materials Science & Engineering at Northwestern University and the other in Physics at Purdue University.

Before moving to Argonne in 2005, Shen was a Senior Staff Scientist and Head of the X-ray Optics Group at Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Materials Science & Engineering at Cornell University for more than seventeen years. He has held visiting scholarship and professorships at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility in France and at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in China.

Shen has received numerous honors and awards during his career, including the S.S. Sidhu Award on outstanding contributions in the area of x-ray diffraction and scattering from the Pittsburgh Diffraction Society, the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the School of Science at Purdue University, and the Lark-Horowitz Prize in Physics from Purdue University. He is an elected Fellow of the American Physical Society for important contributions to x-ray physics, particularly in the field of x-ray diffraction in relationship to the phase problem in proteins. Shen has published more than one hundred research articles in scientific journals and invited book chapters, and has given more than one hundred invited lectures and eighty-plus other presentations in scientific conferences, colloquia, and seminars. At present, his main research interests include high-resolution x-ray microscopic studies of nanoparticles and biological cells using both lens-based x-ray microscopes and lensless imaging methods based on coherent diffraction and phase retrieval.

Shen received his Ph.D. in physics at Purdue University in 1987