“I didn’t want to leave my grandparents and friends behind,” she recalls. “It was challenging, to say the least, to move halfway around the world, speak a new language, make new friends and be a teenager, all at once.”
- 2011: Graduated Washington University School of Medicine in Sant Louis, Missouri
- 2011–2014: Internship and Residency, Internal Medicine, McGaw Medical Center of Northwestern University, Chicago
- 2014–2017: Fellowship in rheumatology, Hospital for Special Surgery–New York Presbyterian Weill Cornell Medicine, New York
- 2015–2017: MS degree, Epidemiology and Health Services, Weil Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences, New York
- 2015–2017: Training Fellowship, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Health Services, New York
- 2017: Musculoskeletal Ultrasound Certification in Rheumatology Examination
- 2019–present: Assistant Professor in Medicine at Duke University, Durham, N.C.
- 2021–present: Reviewer for annual ACR Convergence abstracts on patient outcomes, preferences and attitudes 2022–present: Member, ACR Committee on Research
Dr. Sun considers those challenges and the hard work it took to overcome them blessings that helped shape who she is today. She sometimes felt her socio-cultural background put her at a disadvantage in medical school in comparison to some of her American-born peers. However, her upbringing in China proved an asset at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009 when she landed a coveted research position as a Doris Duke Research Fellow. The opportunity involved conducting HIV research at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Beijing, which required applicants to be fluent in Chinese. That qualification alone narrowed the field of applicants down to just one person—Dr. Sun, who was a medical student at the time.
“I credit the position for helping shape the course of my medical career,” she says, adding that it steered her toward internal medicine residency and engaged her in research in epidemiology and medication adherence, a focus of her career today.
While at Duke, Dr. Sun received the Research to Advance Healthcare (REACH) Equity Career Development Award in 2018 to study racial disparities in medication adherence among patients with lupus. Three years later, she received the Duke CTSA KL2 award to continue her efforts to refine and adapt an adherence intervention for patients with a spectrum of chronic rheumatic diseases. Then, in 2023, she was awarded her first R01 from the National Institutes of Health to test the effect of adherence intervention to improve both patient-clinician communication and medication adherence among patients with lupus.
