Biography

Prof Sun is an internationally recognized expert, researcher, and medical education leader in area of chronic disease and mental disorders. She leads a large scale Chronic Diseases/Mental Illness randomised controlled trials and cohort studies focusing on the prognosis and treatment of patients with cardiovascular disease, diabetes and mental disorders in the era of effective lifestyle based rehabilitation and cognitive behavioural therapy. Her other research interests include global maternal and preterm infants health, and prevention of birth defect, and global burden of disease program. She has been course convenor for two major Health Faculty biostatistics courses at intermediate and advanced level and has taught over 3000 research students to completion since 2007, and led medical research program to medical students since 2014 that over 20-30 papers per year published by medical students. She is currently elected Distinguished Fellow of International Engineering and Technology Institute (IETI), (2023-), accredited Statistician of Australia Society of Statistics (2021-), Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy (SFHEA), elected President of Australia Society of International Engineering and Technology Institute, elected President of Queensland Chinese Association of Scientists and Engineers (2019-2021), and elected Vice-President of Federation of Chinese Scholars Australia (2019-2023). She has chaired six international conference in mental disorders, cancer, and chronic disease, big data and machine learning research since 2016, and being an editor-in-chief for two reputable international journal and associate editor for 10 esteems international journals.

In the past four years, Prof Sun and team has attracted over 9.5 millions Australia Dollars research funding in the health and medical research area, in particular focusing on the health inequality research in global, regional and local level while simultaneously applying big data analytical approach, ranging from multi-level analysis, meta-analysis, Bayesian approach, time series, S16 Sequencing, neuroimaging, to machine learning and deep learning methods for global, national and large clinical and survey data. Her research in health inequality research focuses on sustainable developmental goal and advocate for the positive health outcome of left-behind children, children and mothers in low and middle income countries, people with chronic diseases in order to reduce the health inequality due to quality of health care services. She has published over 300 esteemed journal publications.  She has supervised 11 PhD students as principal supervisor and 10 PhD students as co-principal supervisor to completion, 10 international visiting fellows, and 51 research master degree students to completion since 2010.