SUN JI
Associate Professor
Sun Ji received his Ph.D. from the University of Washington-Seattle, where he applied X-ray crystallography to study membrane transporters and determined the first eukaryotic nitrate transporter, NRT1.1, from Arabidopsis thaliana. Following his interest in membrane protein, Ji pursued further training as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Roderick MacKinnon, the 2003 Nobel Prize Laureate in Chemistry, at The Rockefeller University, where he combined electrophysiology and single-particle cryo-EM to characterize the potassium channel KCNQ1, which is critical for cardiac function and heart rhythm. After that, Ji joined the Department of Structural Biology at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as an assistant faculty, where he employed structural biology and cell biology approaches to understand key molecules in human health and diseases and applied the underlying mechanisms for the development of pharmacological tools. In 2024, the Sun lab moved to Department of Biological Science (DBS) at NUS, and research in the Sun lab focuses on how cellular signalling is regulated spatially and temporarily and leverage such principles to the development of novel therapeutics as well as the ecological balance of our planet.