Shan Lu is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago. She received her Ph.D. at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2008. Prior to joining University of Chicago, she was the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Computer Sciences at University of Wisconsin, Madison, from 2009 to 2014. During her research leave, she was a senior principal research manager at Microsoft, from 2023 to 2026. Her research focuses on software reliability and efficiency, particularly detecting, diagnosing, and fixing functional and performance bugs in large software systems.
Shan is an ACM Distinguished Member (2019 class), an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow (2014), a Distinguished Educator Alumnus from Department of Computer Science at University of Illinois (2013), NSF Career Award recipient (2010), the Rock Star winner from the Association of Chinese Scholars in Computing (2020), and the ACM SIGOPS Mark Weiser award winner (2026). Her co-authored papers won ASPLOS Most Influential Paper Award 2022, Google Scholar Classic Paper 2017, Best Paper Awards at ACM-SIGOPS EuroSys 2025, SOSP 2019, USENIX OSDI 2022, 2016 and USENIX FAST 2013, 3 ACM-SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards at ICSE 2019, ICSE 2015 and FSE 2014, an ACM CHI Honorable Mention Award 2021, an ACM-SIGPLAN Research Highlight Award at PLDI 2011, and an IEEE Micro Top Picks in ASPLOS 2006.
Shan currently serves as the co-Chair of ACM Publication Boards Ethics & Plagiarism Committee. In the past, she served as the Chair of ACM-SIGOPS (2019 –2023), the co-Chair of ACM SIGARCH/SIGMICRO CARES committee (2023–2024), the Vice Chair of ACM SIG Governing Board Executive Committee (2021–2022), and Member-at-Large of ACM SIG Governing Board Executive Committee (2020 — 2022).
Research
Focus Areas: Software Reliability, Systems
Shan’s research focuses on software reliability, particularly detecting, diagnosing, and fixing concurrency bugs and performance bugs in large software systems.
