Rate My Professor Sarah Sun

Sarah Sun is an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science, holding a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. She joined the University of Virginia in 2021, prior to which she served as an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan Technological University. Sun earned her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Case Western Reserve University and her B.S. in Instrumentation Engineering from Tianjin University. Her research specializes in wearable sensors and electronics, wearable robotics, smart and connected health, and cyber-physical systems. Leading the Wearable Electronics and Robotics Laboratory (WEARLab), she pioneers human-centered wearable technologies for motion assistance, neurorehabilitation, pervasive healthcare, soft robotics, and brain-computer interfaces, integrating engineering innovation with human health and behaviors.

Sun has received the NSF CAREER Award in 2018 and the NSF BRITE Award in 2022, along with the Outstanding Associate Editor Award from Elsevier's Smart Health Journal in 2021. Her key publications include "An SSHI Rectifier for Triboelectric Energy Harvesting" (Li, X. and Sun, Y., IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, 2020), "Energy-Efficient ECG Signal Compression for User Data Input in Cyber-Physical Systems by Leveraging Empirical Mode Decomposition" (Huang, H., Hu, S., and Sun, Y., ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, 2019), "A Discrete Curvature Estimation Based Low-Distortion Adaptive Savitzky–Golay Filter for ECG Denoising" (Huang, H., Hu, S., and Sun, Y., Sensors, 2019), "TriboMotion: A Self-Powered Triboelectric Motion Sensor in Wearable Internet of Things for Human Activity Recognition and Energy Harvesting" (Huang, H., Li, X., Liu, S., Hu, S., and Sun, Y., IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2018), and "An Optical Fiber-Based Data-Driven Method for Human Skin Temperature 3-D Mapping" (Liu, W. et al., IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, 2018). She served as General Chair of the IEEE/ACM Conference on Connected Health: Applications, Systems and Engineering Technologies in 2022.