Rate My Professor Yao Sun

Yao Sun is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT). She holds a Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Southern California (2019), an M.Phil. in Communication from Hong Kong Baptist University (2013), and a B.S. in Management from Communication University of China (2011). Her teaching encompasses a range of communication and social science courses, including Interpersonal Communication, Organizational and Group Communication, and special topics such as Analyzing Social Network Theory and Research, Computational Thinking in the Humanities and Social Sciences, and Social Network Theory and Analysis. Upcoming courses include PSY 491: Research and Independent Study and COM 310: Interpersonal Communication in Spring 2026.

Sun's academic interests center on crowdsourcing for innovative knowledge, open innovation theories, citizen science in sustainability, and the interplay between artificial intelligence and human intelligence in online communities. She has produced 22 research outputs, comprising 11 articles, 8 conference contributions, and 3 book chapters. Key publications include 'Open innovation theories' in The Oxford Handbook of Open Innovation (2024, with Ann Majchrzak and Arvind Malhotra), 'Sustainability and citizen science' in Human-Computer Interaction in Intelligent Environments (2024, with Ann Majchrzak), which reviews crowd-empowered approaches and frameworks like robust action and open strategy for co-creating sustainability solutions, and 'Paving the way for COVID survivors’ psychosocial rehabilitation: Mining topics, sentiments, and their trajectories over time from Reddit' in Health Informatics Journal (2024). Recent works feature 'When Artificial Intelligence Meets Human Intelligence: Topics and Sentiments about ChatGPT in Online Knowledge Sharing Communities' (HICSS 2025), 'How to use malleable metaverse stores for branding: testing two proposed metaverse store designs' (Internet Research, 2025), and 'KEGNN: Knowledge-Enhanced Graph Neural Networks for User Engagement Prediction' (ICMR 2025). As principal investigator, she leads a $30,000 project funded by the New Jersey State Policy Lab to study renewable energy adoption attitudes in Newark's under-resourced neighborhoods using AI-based crowdsourcing, collaborating with Maurie Cohen and Zeyuan Qiu. Sun received the NJIT FY2024 Faculty Seed Grant Award and contributes to NJIT's Open Innovation Open Science Lab, focusing on data science and management.