Nan Sun

Nan Sun (孙楚) is a semiconductor scientist who left a tenured associate professorship at the University of Texas at Austin's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering to return to his alma mater, Tsinghua University, as a professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering in 2020. His homecoming came at the height of the US "China Initiative," a policy that targeted scientists for suspected ties to Beijing and left many researchers feeling targeted and alienated.

Sun earned his BS with highest honors from Tsinghua in 2006 and his PhD in engineering sciences from Harvard University in 2010, having spent his undergraduate years ranked top in his department and winning the Outstanding Undergraduate Thesis Award. At UT Austin, he held the Temple Foundation Endowed Associate Professorship and received the NSF CAREER Award in 2013 and the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society New Frontier Award in 2020.

Since joining Tsinghua, Sun and his team have worked on both scientific research and industrial applications aimed at producing more reliable, efficient, and lower-cost chips, taking on multiple major national research projects. Their high-performance circuit design technologies have been integrated into more than 50 commercial chips. He has graduated 26 PhD students, ten of whom now hold professorships at top universities in the US and China, and continues to serve as a Distinguished Lecturer for both the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society and the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society.