Kai Sun 孙凯

Professor, IEEE Fellow
Department of EECS
University of Tennessee

 

Tel: 865-974-3982
Email: kaisun(at)utk.edu

Address: 523 Min H. Kao Building, 1520 Middle Drive, Knoxville, TN 37996-2250

 Curriculum Vitae,   GoogleScholar,   ResearchGate,   IEEEXplore

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

  • 2/2026: Mohammed Khamees successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation titled "Accelerated Simulation and Optimal Voltage Control for Power Systems Integrating Inverter-based Resources." Congratuations to Dr. Khamees!

  • 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

  • Time-Variant Nonlinear Participation Factors for Power Systems (IEEE TPWRS '26).

  • EMT Model Boundary Determination Using Floquet Theory-based Participation Factors (IEEE TPWRS '26).

  • 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).

  • Efficient High-Order Participation Factor Computation via Batch-Structured Tensor Contraction  (IEEE TPWRS '26).

  • An Improved Holomorphic Embedding Method for Power Flows with Phase-Shifting Transformers  (CSEE JPES '26).