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, and the director of the Scalable Computing Software (SCS) laboratory at IIT. His current research interests include parallel and distributed processing, memory and I/O systems, software system for Big Data applications, and performance evaluation and optimization.

Dr. Sun has published over one hundred and eighty 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, CNS-1162540), 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 Application-Aware I/O systems for Big Data applications, and the development of data-centric system software 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 data access optimization and in fault-tolerate computing, respectively. Dr. Sun was elevated to IEEE Fellow in Nov. 2011 for his Contributions to Memory-Bounded Performance Metrics and Scalable Parallel Computing.

Dr. Sun is an IEEE Fellow and a senior member of 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 has been an editor of eight 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 finalist 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. He is the Vice Chair for activities of IEEE Technical Committee of Scalable Computing, a member of the Overseas Expert Board of China Association for Science and Technology (CAST), a board director of the Chinese-American Association of Great Chicago (CAAGC), and a former president of the Society of Chinese-American Professors & Scientists.