Kai Sun 孙凯

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Prof. Sun received his B.S. in Automation (1999) and Ph.D. in Control Science & Engineering (2004) both from Tsinghua University, Beijing. Before joining UTK, he was a Project Manager with the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) in Palo Alto, CA for R&D programs in Grid Operations and Planning from 2007 to 2012. He conducted postdoctoral studies at Arizona State University in 2006-2007 and the University of Western Ontario in 2005. He was a visiting scholar at Harvard University in 2019-2020. Prof. Sun is a recipient of 2016 NSF CAREER award, a faculty Member of NSF/DOE engineering research center CURENT, and an IEEE Fellow.

Prof. Sun's research interests include stability, dynamics and control of power grids and other complex systems.

    

Latest News

• 8/2025: Mahsa Sajjadi successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation titled "Participation Factor-Based Model Reduction and Partitioning for Accelerating Power System Simulations." Congratuations to Dr. Sajjadi!

• 7/2025: Prof. Sun delivered an invited talk titled "Nonlinear Modal Decoupling for Networked Oscillator Systems" at the SIAM Conference on Applied Algebraic Geometry (AG25), held in Madison, WI.

• 6/2025: Our paper "Reduced-Order Phase-Amplitude Characterization of Nonlinear Subsynchronous Oscillations Involving Inverter-Based Resources" (Kaiyang Huang, Dan Wilson, Tianwei Xia, Kai Sun) will be presented as a Best Papers Award paper at the IEEE PES General Meeting in Austin, TX.

Recent Journal Publications

• Generalized High-Order Nodal Formulation for Accelerated Electromagnetic Transient Simulation (IEEE OAJPE '26).

• A Voronoi Diagram-Based Approach for AC Optimal Power Flow (IET GTD '26).

• Descriptor: Phasor Measurement Unit Dataset for Oscillation Source Location (PMU-OSL)  (IEEE DATA '25) .

• Efficient High-Order Participation Factor Computation via Batch-Structured Tensor Contraction  (IEEE TPWRS '25).

• Descriptor: Power Systems Cascading Failure Analysis Synthetic Dataset (PowerCascade)  (IEEE DATA '25) .

• On the Uniqueness of Participation Factors in Nonlinear Dynamical Systems  (JCTA '25).

• A Heterogeneous Multiscale Method for Efficient Simulation of Power Systems with Inverter-Based Resources  (IEEE TPWRS '25).

• Efficient Simulation of Cascading Outages Using an Energy Function-Embedded Quasi-Steady-State Model  (IEEE TPWRS '25) .

• Estimation of Participation Factors for Power System Oscillation from Measurements  (IEEE TIA '25) .