Faculty Profile

Zhi Sun has been a tenured Associate Professor at Tsinghua University since 2021. He received the Ph.D. degree from Georgia Institute of Technology, the M.S. degree from Tsinghua University, and the B.S. degree from Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications (BUPT). Before joining Tsinghua University, Zhi Sun was a tenured Associate Professor at University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, which he joined as an Assistant Professor. Zhi Sun is a senior member of IEEE.

Zhi Sun’s research mainly focuses on the fields of underground and underwater wireless communications and networking, physical layer security, and mobile millimeter wave networking using reconfigurable reflect-arrays. He was a recipient of the US NSF CAREER Award in 2017 and the UB Exceptional Scholar-Young Investigator Award in 2017. To date, he has published more than 90 peer-reviewed journal and conference papers. He received the Best Demo Award at IEEE Infocom in 2017 and the Best Paper Award at IEEE Globecom in 2010. Zhi Sun has been serving as the editor for IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications and Computer Networks (Elsevier) since 2016. During his tenure at University at Buffalo, he has led 7 US federal research projects, from US National Science Foundation and US Department of Energy.

Zhi Sun is interested in solving cross-layer and cross-disciplinary research challenges that will enable novel wireless systems in a vast variety of application domains, ranging from Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) in underwater/underground environments to physical-layer security of Internet of Things (IoT), from autonomous vehicles to mobile millimeter (mmWave) Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). Despite the diversity in the application domain, the common underlying methodological theme of much of his research is a conscious attempt at bridging the physical environment/hardware and the cyber algorithm/protocol aspects of wireless communication and networking systems research with a bottom-up approach.