Rate My Professor Jian Sun

Jian Sun is a professor in the School of Physics and the National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures at Nanjing University. He earned his B.S. in 2002 and his Ph.D. in 2007, both from the Department of Physics at Nanjing University. Following his doctorate, he held research fellow positions supported by fellowships at the National Research Council of Canada (2007–2008), Ruhr University Bochum in Germany (2008–2012), and the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom (2012–2013). He joined Nanjing University as a professor in 2013.

Professor Sun’s research centers on computational condensed matter physics, extreme condition physics, materials design and simulations, and the study of matter under planetary interior conditions. He has developed or co-developed computational methods including the machine learning and graph theory assisted universal structure searcher (MAGUS), the high order tensor message passing interatomic potential (HotPP), and the GPU accelerated molecular dynamics engine (GPUMD). His work has led to predictions of numerous new materials, some subsequently verified experimentally, as well as exotic states of matter at high pressure and temperature such as superionic, plastic, and collective diffusion phases. He has authored more than 130 peer-reviewed papers in leading journals including Nature Physics, Nature Communications, Physical Review Letters, Physical Review X, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Journal of the American Chemical Society. Professor Sun serves on committees of the high pressure physics branch of the Chinese Physics Society, the computational materials science branch of the Chinese Materials Research Society, and the high pressure chemistry branch of the Chinese Chemistry Society. His honors include the Distinguished Young Scholar award from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (2021) and the second prize of the China National Natural Science Award (2011).