William Yun Chen

About

William Yun Chen is an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He completed his PhD in 2016 at Penn State under the supervision of Winnie Li. Prior to his current position, he was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study and an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia and McGill. His research broadly concerns arithmetic geometry, with a particular focus on the interplay between group theory, algebraic geometry, and number theory, especially as mediated by monodromy actions of etale fundamental groups. Chen has a special interest in the connected components of Hurwitz spaces of Galois covers of curves, investigating cases where the genus and number of branch points are fixed while the Galois group varies over infinite families. One notable case he studies is the elliptic curve case (genus 1, one branch point), which relates to exceptional behaviors in associated groups such as braid groups and modular groups, and connects to topics like noncongruence modular curves, the Wiegold conjecture in combinatorial group theory, and Markoff numbers.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Biology
• Cell biology
• Cardiology
• Internal medicine

Selected publications

• Spatial patterns of seismogenic faulting in northeastern Asia

  Earth-Science Reviews · 2021-07-13 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Science knows no borders: Memories of Professor Rong-Sheng Zeng, a pioneering figure of modern geophysics in China

  Earthquake Science · 2025-09-02

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Common-Mode Suppression Structure for Absolute Optical Encoders

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: A Study of Deep Subduction Integrating Broadband Seismology and Mineral Physics

  NSF · $165k · 2006–2012

• Collaborative Research: Imaging the Continental Lithosphere with Earthquake Sources

  NSF · $139k · 2007–2011

• Collaborative Research: Lithospheric-Scale Dynamics of Active Mountain Building Along the Himalayan-Tibetan Collision Zone

  NSF · $718k · 2001–2009

Frequent coauthors

• Chengming Fan

  Central South University

  40 shared

• Jinfu Yang

  Central South University

  37 shared

• Chukwuemeka Daniel Iroegbu

  Central South University

  32 shared

• Ming Wu

  22 shared

• Xun Wu

  Air Force Medical University

  20 shared

• Shiyuan Tang

  20 shared

• T. Tseng

  National Taiwan University

  17 shared

• Robert L. Nowack

  12 shared

Labs

• William Yun Chen LabPI

Similar researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

• Christopher Doddh-60
• Jozsef Baloghh-43
• Yuliy Baryshnikovh-26