Dr. Xiaodong Sun is Professor of Nuclear Engineering and Radiological Sciences at the University of Michigan, where he currently serves as Interim Chair of the department and has been a faculty member since 2017. He earned dual master’s degrees and a doctorate from Purdue University in nuclear and mechanical engineering, building on undergraduate and graduate training in thermal and nuclear engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. Over a career spanning more than two decades, Dr. Sun has established himself as a leading authority in nuclear thermal-hydraulics, with research spanning post-critical heat flux heat transfer, two-phase flow dynamics, advanced heat exchanger design, and passive safety systems for next-generation reactor concepts including molten salt, fluoride salt-cooled, and high-temperature gas-cooled reactors. His experimental and computational work has been supported by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the Department of Energy, and he has supervised more than a dozen doctoral students and postdoctoral researchers across his time at Ohio State University and Michigan.
Dr. Sun is widely recognized within the nuclear engineering community for both his research contributions and his service to the field. He is a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society and a NURETH Fellow, and has received multiple best paper awards at leading international conferences as recently as 2025, along with the ANS Thermal Hydraulics Division Technical Achievement Award and several departmental teaching and research honors from the University of Michigan. He has served in leadership roles across the ANS Thermal-Hydraulics Division — including as Division Chair — and has held technical program leadership positions at numerous international conferences on nuclear reactor thermal-hydraulics, including serving as General Co-Chair of NURETH-19. With over 110 refereed journal publications and 210 conference papers, his work continues to shape experimental methods and safety analysis frameworks for advanced reactor development.