Dr. De‑Zheng Sun's primary research interest lies in Climate and Earth System dynamics, with the goal of understanding and predicting the dynamic state of the Earth's climate system, in particular, its stability and variability under anthropogenic forcing. His work addresses critical questions such as whether we will experience stronger and more frequent El Niño events¹, or whether the whole planet could undergo a Venus-style, runaway instability in response to anthropogenic forcing². Dr. Sun tackles these questions through the use of a hierarchy of mathematical models for the climate system³. He and his team are especially interested in understanding and predicting the complex behaviors of the Earth's climate system, such as threshold behaviors and emergent structures. They also seek to apply the insights gained from their research into the Earth's climate system to improve understanding and prediction of the behaviors of other complex systems that are crucial for the survival and flourishing of the human species.

Dr. Sun received his Ph.D. in Meteorology from MIT and has worked at leading Earth System modeling centers including the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) at Princeton University, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), and through the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), at the NOAA Earth System Research Laboratories (ESRL) in Boulder. He has taught a broad range of undergraduate and graduate courses in the area of Climate and Earth System Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Fudan University, and more recently Nanjing University. Dr. Sun has been awarded grants from the leading funding agencies for Climate and Earth System Sciences including the US National Science Foundation, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation. Dr. Sun, along with Dr. Frank Bryan at NCAR, co‑edited the AGU monograph on climate dynamics Climate Dynamics: Why Does Climate Vary?.

Among the many original contributions to the advancement of climate science by Dr. Sun and his collaborators are (1) the dynamical ocean thermostat theory for the regulation of the tropical maximum SST, (2) the diabatic and nonlinear origin of El Niño, and (3) rectification of ENSO into the mean state as a mechanism for climate variability on decadal and longer time scales. Dr. Sun has published his work in Science, Journal of Climate, and many other prominent journals.

Currently, Dr. Sun is a Distinguished Professor at Nanjing University. His previous positions include serving as a Distinguished Professor at Fudan University and as a Senior Research Scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), a joint institute between NOAA and the University of Colorado Boulder.