In August 2019, on the recommendation of a few faculty members from her home institution, Tsinghua University, Shuo Sun arrived in Madison. A fourth-year industrial engineering undergraduate, she came to the United States as part of an exchange program between the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Tsinghua, one of China’s top-rated universities, to experience one semester of an American education.
“It was very beautiful. I could see the lake. That was my first impression of the U.S.,” Sun recalls. “And the campus was very peaceful and very beautiful.”
That fall semester in Madison proved to be crucial in shaping Sun’s path: It pulled her further into operations research, inspired her to return stateside to pursue her PhD, and left a warm impression that lingered when she hit the academic job market.
Seven years after she first set foot in Madison, Sun has returned as an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. She studies modeling and algorithmic design for decision-making in retail operations and supply chain management, leveraging optimization, machine learning and other data science methods.
“I like to think of problems that come from real-world life,” she says. “It should be grounded in practice, but I hope it can be generalized. I like this combination.”
Sun earned her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, interning with the e-commerce team at Amazon during summer 2024 and also collaborating with JD.com, China’s largest retailer by revenue. As online shopping habits change, incorporating systems such as artificial intelligence-powered agents, she’s keen to build new models to make those systems work more efficiently. The applications extend well beyond retail: Sun envisions her work contributing to supply chains of all types and, more broadly, to decision-making systems.
“I want to improve the efficiency of operations in real life by developing rigorous methodologies. For some problems, I’m very excited to explore the theoretical properties behind the problem and draw inspiration for algorithm design,” she says. “There are opportunities to improve existing solutions and the overall efficiency of decision-making systems, while AI also brings new problems in different scenarios.”
During her semester in Madison in fall 2019, she took ISyE 525: Linear Optimization with Professor Alberto Del Pia. The challenging but mathematically beautiful course deepened her interest in operations research.
“That’s my favorite theory course during my whole undergraduate study,” she says. During that semester, she also took core ISyE courses in simulation, healthcare systems and machine learning, all of which further sparked her interest in pursuing advanced study in the field.
As an undergraduate at UW-Madison, Sun also enjoyed working with her classmates on group projects, trying different types of food on State Street, discovering her love of musicals after seeing Hamilton at Madison’s Overture Center, and seeing snow that reminded her of home in central China.
Now, she’s excited to be back in Madison and to begin building out her lab and working with students.
“Now that I’m back, I want to give what I’ve learned back to the next generation of students,” she says. “And I want to teach students how to use new methodologies from machine learning, data analytics and even generative AI to solve complex problems in real life.”