is a professor of Computer Science and the Chairman of the Department of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). He received his BS in Mathematics in 1982 from Beijing Normal University, P.R. China, and completed his MS in Mathematics, MS and Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1985, 1987, and 1990, respectively, all from Michigan State University. He was a post-doctoral researcher at the Ames National Laboratory, a staff scientist at the ICASE, NASA Langley Research Center, an ASEE fellow at the US Navy Research Laboratories, and was an associate professor and the founding director of the Scalable Computing Software laboratory in the Department of Computer Science, Louisiana State University before he joined the Computer Science Department, IIT in August 1999. Currently he is a professor at IIT, an IEEE fellow, a guest faculty in the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the Argonne National Laboratory, a visiting scientist at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and the director of the Scalable Computing Software laboratory at IIT. His current research interests include parallel and distributed processing, memory and I/O systems, software systems, and performance evaluation and optimization.

Dr. Sun has published over one hundred and fifty research articles in the field of computer science and communication, has two US patents and one China patent, and his research is supported by NSF (NSF-JEAP, ACS-9720215, CCR-9972251, EIA-0130673, ANI-0123930, ACI-0130458, EIA-0224377, ACI-0305355, CNS-0406328, SCI-0504291,CNS-0509118, CCF-0621435, CCF-0702737, CNS-0751200, CNS-0834514, CCF-0937877), and other US government agencies. His research in mobility of legacy code is one of the first nine projects supported by the National Science Foundation under the Middleware Initiative program. His PDD and PPT algorithms have been included in IBM's Parallel Engineering and Scientific Software Library (PESSL) and other commercial and research software packages as a community standard. His memory-bounded (the so-called Sun-Ni's law) and memory access delay performance model are introduced in many modern textbooks as a must known in performance evaluation of scalable computing systems. Chicago Sun-Times called his work in cross-network service as turning "POTS (plain Old Telephone service) into PANS (Pretty Amazing New Stuff), moving (landline) phone into the internet loop" (May 12, 2003). An IETF Internet standard (RFC--RFC3910) was officially released in 2004 based on his novel concept of cross-network service. His current research includes the development of the Data Access Server system for high performance machines, and the development of the Fault awareness ENabled Computing Environment (FENCE) for high end computing. His group received the ACM/IEEE HPC award and the NSF V-Tech HEC Challenge award in 2008, 2007 and 2006 for its contribution in the Data Access Server project and the FENCE project, respectively.

Dr. Sun is a senior member of IEEE and ACM, a member of the honor society PHI KAPPA PHI and SIGMA XI, and was a distinguished speaker of IEEE CS society from 2001 to 2003. He is an editor of six international professional journals, including the flagship journals in parallel and distributed processing: IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems and Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. He has served and is serving as the chairman or a member of program committee for numerous international conferences and workshops, and served and is serving on several boards and committees of goverment agencies and private fundations for research activities. He received the ONR and ASEE Certificate of Recognition award in 1999, the Best Paper Award at the International Conference on Parallel Processing in 2001, the Best Poster Award at IEEE International SuperComputing Conference in 2003, the IIT Dean's Excellence Award for Research in 2006, the Best Paper nomination at the IEEE/ACM SuperComputing Conference in 2008, and the SIGMA XI/IIT seniro research award in 2009. He is a Tan Chin Tuan Fellow, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, a Guest Professor, University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautic, P. R. China, and the president of the Society of Chinese-American Professors & Scientists.