A version of this story originally appeared in U of T Engineering News.
Yu Sun, former Robotics Institute director and professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Industrial Engineering, has been elected an international member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering (NAE). The NAE provides engineering leadership in service to the United States and globally; its members rank among the world’s most accomplished engineers.
Sun has made seminal contributions to our ability to manipulate micro- and nanometer-sized objects, which is critical for both scientific discovery and industrial applications. He invented the world’s first fully closed-loop controlled robotic nanomanipulation system that can operate inside the high vacuum chamber of electron microscopes for automated single transistor probing and in-situ electromechanical materials testing. His nanomanipulation instruments have been licensed to industry for semiconductor failure analysis and materials testing, and are now used worldwide.
Sun has also applied his expertise in nano-instrumentation to make breakthroughs in robotic surgery at the cellular level. He developed the world’s first robotic system for performing precision surgery on single moving sperm and ovarian cells. His robotic cell surgery technique resulted in the first human robotic fertilization and has significantly improved clinical outcomes in infertility treatment. To tackle tumour surgery at the single-cell level, he spearheaded the development of magnetic cell manipulation instruments generating multi-modal magnetic fields to mechanically kill cancerous cells from the inside.
Sun is one of only a handful of Canadians to be elected to all three of the national academies — the Canadian Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Canada and the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences. He is also a fellow of the American Society for the Advancement of Science, the U.S. National Academy of Inventors, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Canadian Society for Mechanical Engineering, the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, and IEEE.