Shu-Kun Lin was born in 1957 in Hanchuan, Hubei Province, China. He graduated with a B.Sc. from Wuhan University in January 1982, majoring in inorganic chemistry; he then studied physical chemistry in the Lanzhou Institute of Chemical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (1982–1986, M.Sc. awarded in 1985) and in the USA (University of Louisville, January 1987–July 1989). He received his doctorate (organic chemistry) from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH-Zürich) in 1992 following studies over three years in the group of Prof. Dr. Bernhard Jaun (Laboratory of Organic Chemistry). He  then worked at Ciba-Geigy Ltd. (Basel, Switzerland) for three years, first as a postdoctoral research associate in organic synthesis and drug discovery, then at the Dyestuffs Division of Ciba-Geigy Ltd. which involved dyestuff R&D and production. He also stayed for 6 months in 1996 in Prof. Dr. B. Giese's group (Organic Chemistry Institute, University of Basel), as a postdoctoral research associate.

Although he had a very interesting entropy-symmetry-stability theory in physical chemstry called similarity principle based on his resolution of Gibbs paradox, he did not believe the theory to be important enough to deserve any financial support and he has kept it as his hobby. In 1996, Shu-Kun Lin initiated a samples collection and exchange project, and founded the international organization MDPI in Switzerland to implement this. In 1996 he launched the first MDPI journal Molecules, to encourage authors to deposit research samples of compounds from their work. He is the founder or co-founder of several other open access journals including Entropy (1999), International Journal of Molecular Sciences (2000), Sensors (2001), Marine Drugs (2003) and International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (2004). He became the Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal Molecular Diversity in 2002 and held this position until his resignation in June 2007. He is the publisher of MDPI journals. He is the principal author of over 40 publications. Shu-Kun Lin is married with four children.

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