Dr. Shan was born and grew up in Shandong/China. He obtained his BSc in Physics at Shandong Normal University/China, MSc and PhD in Biomechanics at University of Münster/Germany. After his PhD, Dr. Shan went to the University of Vermont/USA and started his postdoc research on senior’s health, supported by the NIH – National Institute of Health, USA. In 2000, he joined the faculty at the University of Lethbridge. After establishing the Biomechanics Lab at U of L, he has initiated several cross-faculty research projects, including sports biomechanics, biomechanics of music performance, ergonomics, sports equipment development and senior balancing & fall prevention. In the past decade, Dr.Shan’s research has been supported by Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Sport Science Association of Alberta (SSAA), Alberta Foundation for the Arts (AFA), Covenant Health Research Center (CHRC) and Southern Alberta Intellectual Property Network (SAIPN).
Dr. Shan’s research has attracted attention from both academia and the general public. He is honored to have been featured as direct evidence of “synergies ... contributing to world class scholarship” by the 2010 edition of Maclean’s Guide to Canadian Universities. The guide portrayed his research to be exemplary of cross-faculty collaborations, which it viewed as a positive characteristic of the University of Lethbridge. Individual projects have also attracted international, national and local attention. The project on musicians’ Overuse Syndrome was reported by the Discovery Channel/Canada, A-Channel/Alberta, Inside Science News Service/USA and various newspapers. The first two papers reporting on this project are in the top 3% and 5% of the most cited articles in the top journal for arts medicine. His sport-related projects have also received international recognition and, for recognizing his outstanding contributions in sports biomechanics over a period of years, he was granted the ISBS Fellow Award in 2012 (International Society of Biomechanics in Sports). Individual projects such as soccer kick, anthropometry and golf swing analysis are examples of his research excellence. Using 3D motion capture and full body biomechanical modeling, Dr. Shan pioneered quantitative characterization of maximal instep kick - the most important skill for scoring a goal in soccer. The results of this project were published in several top journals in sport science. The paper published in Sports Biomechanics (2005) ranks in top 20 on both the Most Cited and the Most Read Articles of the journal. In 2012, his achievement in soccer study was recognized by the 30th ISBS conference through the award: “Best Coach Friendly Paper”. The other paper communicating Anthropometry Studies related to human movement modeling (2003) ranks in the top 2% of most cited articles from Applied Ergonomics. The project examining golf swing biomechanics has won multiple international awards, including 1st Prize of Sports Engineering Student Project Competition (International Sports Engineering Association) in 2008.
Additionally, based on his research results, Dr. Shan has designed and prototyped several new equipment, such as bi-directional pedaling bicycle (both forward and backward pedaling to generate forward movement) for postpone fatigue during longtime cycling, perturbation platform for the testing of sensori-motor degradation related to age and hammer throw analyzer for biofeedback training in practice.