Dr. Fengzhu Sun

About Dr. Fengzhu Sun

Dr. Fengzhu Sun is a Professor of Quantitative and Computational Biology and Mathematics. His Bachelors in Mathematics is from Shandong University, Masters in Probability and Statistics is from Peking University, and PhD in Applied Mathematics is from University of Southern California. He came back to USC in 2000 as an associate professor after being an assistant professor of genetics and biostatistics at Emory University from 1995 to 2000. He has been a professor since 2006.

Professor Sun works in the area of Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, Statistical Genetics, and Mathematical Modeling. His research interests include protein interaction networks, gene expression, single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP), linkage disequilibrium (LD) and their applications in predicting protein functions, gene regulation networks, and disease gene identification. He also developed alignment-free methods for the comparison of genome and metagenome sequences. His most recent research interest is on metagenomics.

His previous research accomplishments include: 1) virus and virus-host interaction in metagenomes, 2) new alignment-free statistics including d2* and d2s for genome and metagenome comparison, 3) a suite of algorithms for local similarity analysis (LSA) of time series data, 4) protein domain interaction and protein function prediction integrating multiple data sources, 5) dynamic programming algorithms for haplotype block partition and tag SNP selection, 6) 1-TDT: transmission disequilibrium test when one parent is available, and 7) theoretical studies of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) related biotechnologies.

Professor Sun is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS, 2012), American Statistical Association (ASA, 2015), Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS, 2023), and the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB, 2024). He is also an elected member of the International Statistical Institute (ISI, 2012), and a recipient of USC Mellon Mentoring award for faculty mentoring (2012). In 2017, he received the USC Dornsife College senior Raubenheimer Outstanding Faculty Award for excellence in the areas of research, teaching and service.