Picture of Shuli

Shuli Chen

I am currently a postdoctoral member at the Institute for Advanced Study, working on geometric analysis. Broadly speaking, my research is about how analytic conditions constrain geometry and topology, and how strong these constraints can be.

Previously I was an L. E. Dickson Instrutor at the University of Chicago from January 2025 to August 2026. Before that I was a Uhlenbeck Postdoctoral Fellow at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath / MSRI) during fall 2024, attending the program "New Frontiers in Curvature: Flows, General Relativity, Minimal Submanifolds, and Symmetry."

I graduated with a PhD in mathematics from Stanford University in June 2024. My advisor is Otis Chodosh. I obtained my Bachelor of Arts degree from Cornell University in May 2018, and I spent Spring 2017 at the Budapest Semester in Mathematics.

You can reach me by emailing me at shulic AT ias DOT edu.


Research

  1. Uniformly positive scalar curvature on manifold interiors. [arXiv:2610.07608]
  2. Optimal decay constant for complete manifolds of positive scalar curvature with quadratic decay. Math. Ann., 95:Paper No. 12, 2026. [arXiv:2508.04173] [journal]
  3. Interior control for surfaces with positive scalar curvature and its application. Comm. Anal. Geom., 33(8):1865-1887, 2025. [arXiv:2502.14216] [journal]
    With Jianchun Chu and Jintian Zhu.
  4. Positive scalar curvature metric and aspherical summands. Accepted by Duke Math. J. [arXiv:2312.04698]
    With Jianchun Chu and Jintian Zhu.
  5. Index of minimal hypersurfaces in real projective spaces. Int. Math. Res. Not. IMRN, 2024(10):8592-8608, 2024. [arXiv:2301.02932] [journal]
  6. A generalization of the Geroch conjecture with arbitrary ends. Math. Ann., 2023. [arXiv:2212.10014] [journal]
  7. Stable submanifolds in the product of projective spaces II. Calc. Var., 64(5):145, 2025. [arXiv:2204.07685] [journal]
    With Alejandra Ramirez-Luna.
  8. On the index of minimal surfaces with free boundary in a half-space. J. Geom. Anal., 33(2):46, 2023. [arXiv:2103.10588] [journal]
  9. On the generalized Erdős-Kneser conjecture: Proofs and reductions. J. Combin. Theory Ser. B, 135:227-237, 2019. [arXiv:1712.03456] [journal]
    With Jai Aslam, Ethan Coldren, Florian Frick, and Linus Setiabrata.
  10. Jacobi-Trudi determinants over finite fields. Ann. Comb., 22(3):447-489, 2018. [arXiv:1611.00216] [journal]
    With Ben Anzis, Yibo Gao, Jesse Kim, Zhaoqi Li, and Rebecca Patrias.
  11. Coincidences among skew stable and dual stable Grothendieck polynomials. Involve, 11(1):143-167, 2017. [arXiv:1609.06171] [journal]
    With Ethan Alwaise, Alexander Clifton, Rebecca Patrias, Rohil Prasad, Madeline Shinners, and Albert Zheng.

Teaching

Instructor at UChicago

Math 20300       Regular Analysis I
Winter 2025, Winter 2026, Spring 2026 (2 sessions)
Here are my lecture notes for Math 20300.
Math 20400       Regular Analysis II
Spring 2025 (2 sessions)
Here are my lecture notes for Math 20400.

Teaching assistant at Stanford

Math 51       Linear Algebra, Multivariable Calculus, and Modern Applications
Winter 2021
Math 53       Differential Equations with Linear Algebra, Fourier Methods, and Modern Applications
Autumn 2022, Autumn 2023
I also made widgets for Math 53. Check them out!
Here is a guide to Stanford introductory math courses.

Course assistant at Stanford

Math 19       Calculus I
Autumn 2018
Math 20       Calculus II
Winter 2020
Math 106       Functions of a Complex Variable
Winter 2022
Math 107       Graph Theory
Spring 2019
Math 205A       Real Analysis
Autumn 2020
Math 205B       Functional Analysis
Winter 2023
Math 215C       Riemannian Geometry
Spring 2023, Spring 2024

Miscellaneous

  • I am a fan of comedies, especially Xiangsheng (相声). Here is a video of me and my friend performing Xiangsheng 对春联 at the 2016 Cornell Spring Festival Gala. The performance starts about 20 minutes into the video.
    • Last Updated: 10/21/2026