She is Michael G. Parsons Collegiate Professor of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at the University of Michigan, and chair of the University of Michigan Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering.
She completed a Ph.D. in electrical engineering systems at the University of Southern California in 1989.
[2] After completing her doctorate, she became an assistant professor at Wayne State University, but left academia in 1993 to become a control systems engineer at Ford Research Laboratories, part of the Ford Motor Company.
[2] With Petros A. Ioannou, Sun is the coauthor of the book Robust Adaptive Control (Prentice-Hall, 1996, and Dover, 2012).[3].
In 2004, she was named an IEEE Fellow "for contributions to systems theory and automotive powertrain control".