Sun attended Huaining High School in
Huaining County,
Anhui, China, before being admitted to the
Special Class for the Gifted Young at the
University of Science and Technology of China in 2002. After graduating from the program with a B.S. in 2006, he moved to the United States to pursue graduate studies at the
University of Wisconsin, obtaining his Ph.D. in mathematics (
differential geometry) in 2010. His doctoral advisor was
Xiuxiong Chen, and his dissertation was titled "
Kempf–Ness theorem and uniqueness of extremal metrics". Sun worked as a research associate at
Imperial College London before becoming an assistant professor at
Stony Brook University in 2013. where he was promoted to full professor in 2021. He was an invited speaker at the 2018
International Congress of Mathematicians in Rio de Janeiro. In 2021, he was awarded the New Horizons Prize in Mathematics by the
Breakthrough Prize Foundation, for many groundbreaking contributions to complex differential geometry, including existence results for Kahler-Einstein metrics and connections with moduli questions and singularities. In January 2024, he returned to China and joined the Institute for Advanced Study in Mathematics (IASM) at
Zhejiang University. == Conjecture on Fano manifolds and Veblen Prize ==