Prof. Yu Sun '03 Elected to the National Academy of Engineering
Prof. Yu Sun '03 has been elected as an International Member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE), Class of 2026, for contributions to industrial-grade nanomanipulation instrumentation and contributions to the field of robotic cell surgery.
Yu Sun’s PhD was in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Minnesota in 2003.
Prof. Sun is currently a faculty member in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University of Toronto, with joint appointments in the Institute of Biomedical Engineering, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Department of Computer Science. At UofT, he served as the Director of the Robotics Institute and the Director of Toronto Nanofabrication Centre.
His research focuses on developing innovative technologies and instruments for manipulating and characterizing cells, molecules, and nanomaterials. He has made seminal contributions to our capability to manipulate micro and nanometer-sized objects, which is critical for both scientific discoveries and industrial applications.
He is a Fellow of Canadian Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of Royal Society of Canada, a Fellow of Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and an International Member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He was also elected Fellow of IEEE, ASME, AIMBE, AAAS, NAI, CSME, and EIC for his work on robotic systems and devices. Among the awards he received were the UofT McLean Award, UofT President’s Impact Award, NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Fellowship, NSERC Synergy Award of Innovation, IEEE McNaughton Gold Medal, IEEE EMBS Technical Achievement Award, and IEEE NTC Pioneer Award in Nanotechnology. He is the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Trans. Automation Science and Engineering and an editorial board member of the AAAS journal, Science Robotics.
More about research:
“Yu Sun has made seminal contributions to our ability to manipulate micro- and nanometer-sized objects, which is critical for both scientific discovery and industrial applications. For example, he invented the world’s first fully closed-loop controlled robotic nanomanipulation system that can operate inside the high vacuum chamber of electron microscopes for automated single transistor probing and in-situ electromechanical materials testing. His nanomanipulation instruments were licensed to industry for semiconductor failure analysis and materials testing and are now used worldwide.
Sun has also applied his expertise in nano-instrumentation to make breakthroughs in robotic surgery at the cellular level. For example, he developed the world’s first robotic system for performing precision surgery on single moving sperm and oocytes. His robotic cell surgery resulted in the first human robotic fertilization and has significantly improved clinical outcomes in infertility treatment. To tackle tumor surgery at the single-cell level, he spearheaded the development of magnetic cell manipulation instruments generating multi-modal magnetic fields to mechanically kill cancerous cells from the inside.
Sun is one of only a handful of Canadians to be elected to all three of the national academies – the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Canada, and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. He is also a Fellow of the American Society for the Advancement of Science, the U.S. National Academy of Inventors, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering, the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.”