Shiran Victoria Shen

Shiran Victoria Shen will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis, starting in the fall of 2025. She is currently a Senior Research Scholar at the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy. Prof. Shen is an interdisciplinary environmental scholar whose research explores how incentives and institutions shape climate and environmental actions in developing countries, with a particular focus on China, as well as their role in shaping international climate policies. Her broader interests span public policy and governance. 

Her first book, The Political Regulation Wave: A Case of How Local Incentives Systematically Shape Air Quality in China (Cambridge University Press, 2022), has received major association awards for public policy research, including the 2023 International Public Policy Association Early Career Research Award, the 2020 American Political Science Association Harold D. Lasswell Award, and the 2019 Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Ph.D. Dissertation Award. Additionally, it received the 2017 American Political Science Association Paul A. Sabatier Award and the 2018 Southern Political Science Association Malcolm Jewell Award. Her second book, Compliance with Policy, is under contract with Cambridge University Press as part of the Elements Series in Public Policy. Her other works have been published in leading journals, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Policy Studies Journal. 

She holds a joint degree from Stanford University, where she was the first to earn an M.S. in civil and environmental engineering alongside a Ph.D. in political science after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Swarthmore College. During 2021-22, she was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution.