Yan-Shen Shan completed his MD in 1993. After the residency training in the Department of Surgery, National Cheng Kung University Hospital, Tainan, Taiwan, he also got the PhD in 2004 from Institute of Clinical Medicine, National Cheng Kung University. He was pointed to establish and be the 1st director of Division of Trauma (2011~2016.7), the 1st UGI cancer team convener (2010~2017.12), and the Director of Clinical Medicine Research Center (2016.8~2019.7) in National Cheng Kung University Hospital. He was awarded as the distinguished professor since 2016 Aug and elected to be chief of the Institute of Clinical Medicine, NCKU from Aug 2017 to Jul 2019. Recent years, he devoted in management of biliopancreatic cancer and gastric cancer, the translational study of biliary tract cancer, pancreatic cancer, gastric cancer and GIST. Most importantly, Prof Shan established algorithms for management of pancreatic cancer, including adopting new approaches to resect pancreatic cancer and designed personized medicine to treat and follow patients who received genomic study. He also performed several PI-initiated clinical trials and attended international trials in stomach, biliary, and pancreatic cancer. In translational study, he tried to explore the tumor microenvironment of pancreatic cancer and gastric cancer. He found the oncogenic role of tumor associated macrophages and fibroblasts in the pancreatic cancer tumor microenvironment. Therefore, he led team members to develop new treatment for cancers now. As the progress of AI in medicine, he also cooperated with scientists in medical device and AI, he hopes to develop new tool for diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and new drug to treat pancreatic cancer.
Dr Shan has published more than 270 papers in reputed journals. He got outstanding research awards of Taiwan MOST, Clinical cancer research of Taiwan Cancer Society, Basic cancer research of Taiwan Cancer Society, and more than 7 years of golden awards of International Surgical Society. For his excellent achievement, since 2016 May, he also got the grant support from Ministry of Science and Technology, Taiwan, to be the leader PI of TCTC-UGI group in Taiwan and was also nominated as member council of Asian-Ocean Pancreatic Association (AOPA) in 2018. From Aug 2019, He was elected to be the Dean of College of Medicine, NCKU. In 2024, He was also nominated as the President of Taiwan Surgical Society of Gastroenterology and Taiwan Gastric Cancer Society. In 2025, he was elected as the first president of Taiwan Chapter, SSAT, USA.