Gan Shen

About

I'm a 6th-year PhD candidate (expected to graduate in 2026) in Computer Science at UC Santa Cruz, advised by Lindsey Kuper in the LSD lab. My research lies in programming languages and formal verification, focusing on their applications to building reliable software systems that are provably correct.

Specifically, I work on choreographic programming, a paradigm for programming distributed systems in which the entire system is expressed as a single program and then projected into separate programs for each node. In this way, interactions between nodes are manifest and guaranteed to be deadlock-free. We developed HasChor, an embedded domain-specific language in Haskell for choreographic programming, to experiment with language design and build real-world distributed systems.

I've interned three times (2022, 2023, and 2025) at Amazon Web Services in the Automated Reasoning Group.

Publications

• Freer arrows and why you need them in Haskell
  Grant VanDomelen, Gan Shen, Lindsey Kuper, Yao Li
  Haskell Symposium 2025

• Efficient, Portable, Census-Polymorphic Choreographic Programming
  Mako Bates, Shun Kashiwa, Syed Jafri, Gan Shen, Lindsey Kuper, Joseph P. Near
  PLDI 2025

• Toward Verified Library-Level Choreographic Programming with Algebraic Effects
  Gan Shen, Lindsey Kuper
  CP 2024

• HasChor: Functional Choreographic Programming for All (Functional Pearl)
  Gan Shen, Shun Kashiwa, Lindsey Kuper
  ICFP 2023     Distinguished Paper Award

• Verified Causal Broadcast with Liquid Haskell
  Patrick Redmond, Gan Shen, Niki Vazou, Lindsey Kuper
  IFL 2022

• Toward Hole-Driven Development with Liquid Haskell
  Patrick Redmond, Gan Shen, Lindsey Kuper
  HATRA 2021

• Toward SMT-Based Refinement Types in Agda
  Gan Shen, Lindsey Kuper
  HATRA 2021

• Parameters extraction for equivalent circuit model based on artificial intelligence
  Linchun Liu, Zhimin Guan, Gan Shen, Peng Zhao, Gaofeng Wang
  ICCEM 2019

Teaching

At UC Santa Cruz, as a teaching assistant:

• Foundations of Programming Languages, Fall 2024
• Foundations of Programming Languages, Spring 2022
• Parallel and Concurrent Programming, Spring 2021
• Fundmentals of Compiler Design I, Winter 2020
  

Services

I've been a reviewer for JFP and a sub-reviewer for POPL 2022 and OOPSLA 2025.

I co-organized the LSD Seminar from Fall 2023 to Spring 2025.

Personal

• I'm from Suzhou, China, a beautiful city with 2500 years of history and known for its classical gardens.
• My Chinese name is 沈赣. My given name 赣 (Gan) is a reference to the Jiangxi province of China, my mother's home state.
• When I am not doing research, I enjoy table tennis, rock climbing, and video games.