Dr. Li Sun

Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
Director of Subsea Engineering Program

Office Location N224 Engineering Building 1

Phone 713-743-4509

Fax 713-743-4503

Email lsun4 [at] uh.edu

Website Advanced Functional Materials Laboratory

Education

Ph.D., Materials Science and Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, March 2002

M.S., Materials Science and Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, 1999

B.S., Physics, Nanjing University, China, 1993

Professional Experience

2009-present: Associate Professor of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Houston

2003 – 2009: Bill D. Cook Endowed Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Houston

2002-2003: NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, Johns Hopkins University

Professional and Scientific Affiliations

Materials Research Society

American Chemical Society

American Physical Society

Research Interests

Nanomaterials fabrication and manipulation
Multifunctional polymer composites
Spintronics
Ferroelectric materials
Application of nanostructured materials in sensing and biomedical devices

Engineering Applications

Nanomaterials fabrication and manipulation; Spintronics; application of magnetic nanostructures in sensoring and biomedical devices.

Research Facilities

Electrochemical fabrication lab, Sputtering deposition and characterization lab.

Awards & Honors

Bill D. Cook Faculty Scholars Endowment (2003-2008)

NSF 4th US-Japan Exchange Program for Young Researchers in Nanotechnology (2007)

NSF Fellowship for Summer Institute at Northwestern University (2004, 2006, 2009)

NSF Materials Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) Postdoctoral Fellowship (2002-2003)

Selected Publications

Wang, P.-C., Chen, M.-H., Jenkinson, J., Song, Y.-X., Sun, L. (2024). Interfacial friction effects on sealing performances of elastomer packer. Petroleum Science, 21(3), 2037–2047.
Risal, S., Singh, N., Yao, Y., Zhu, W. (2024). Accelerating Elastic Property Prediction in Fe-C Alloys through Coupling of Molecular Dynamics and Machine Learning. Materials, 17(3), 601.
Wang, F., Zhou, B., Wang, R., Fan, Z., Sun, L. (2024). Engineering microcracks in MWCNT/elastomer bilayers for high-performance stretchable sensor development. Nanotechnology, 35(3), 035502.
Risal, S., Singh, N., Duff, A.I., Zhu, W. (2023). Development of the RF-MEAM Interatomic Potential for the Fe-C System to Study the Temperature-Dependent Elastic Properties. Materials, 16(10), 3779.
Cheng, K., Huang, Z., Wang, P., Ardebili, H., Karim, A. (2023). Antibacterial flexible triboelectric nanogenerator via capillary force lithography. Journal of Colloid and Interface Science, 630, 611–622.
Zhang, H., Sun, L., Song, C., Zhong, J., Sun, L. (2022). Integrated solid-state wearable sweat sensor system for sodium and potassium ion concentration detection. Sensor Review, 42(1), 76–88.
Wang, Y., Wang, F., Yazigi, S., Zhong, J., Sun, L. (2021). Nanoengineered highly sensitive and stable soft strain sensor built from cracked carbon nanotube network/composite bilayers. Carbon, 173, 849–856.
Risal, S., Zhu, W., Guillen, P., Sun, L. (2021). Improving phase prediction accuracy for high entropy alloys with Machine learning. Computational Materials Science, 192, 110389.