Rate My Professor Ruping Sun

Ruping Sun, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Medical School, where he leads the SunPath Lab affiliated with the Masonic Cancer Center. He earned his PhD in Genetics from the Institute of Genetics at Fudan University in Shanghai in 2009. His postdoctoral training included a fellowship in the Department of Systems Biology at Columbia University from 2013 to 2015 and another in the Department of Computational Molecular Biology at the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics in Berlin from 2009 to 2013. Prior to joining the University of Minnesota in 2019, he served as an Instructor in the Departments of Medicine and Genetics at Stanford Medical School since 2015, following a research associate position there.

Dr. Sun is a computational geneticist whose research centers on the translational genomics of solid tumors. He has developed expertise in algorithm design and statistical analysis of (epi)genetic sequencing data, as well as computational modeling of cancer, including gene regulatory circuits and cellular automata models. His pioneering work links intra-tumor heterogeneity with tumor growth dynamics using multi-region sequencing of solid tumors and introduces regional-assembly into fusion transcript prediction, identifying CD74-NRG1 as a potential therapeutic target for the invasive mucinous subtype of lung cancer. The SunPath Lab focuses on quantifying and modeling tumor heterogeneity from next-generation sequencing data to infer cancer kinetics, developing methods for high-fidelity quantification of (epi)genomic heterogeneity, and visualizing patterns to reveal principles of genomic heterogeneity, clonal dynamics, and somatic variant detectability. Key publications include 'Evolving copy number gains promote tumor expansion and bolster mutational diversification' (Nature Communications, 2024), 'Oncogene-like addiction to aneuploidy in human cancers' (Science, 2023), 'Elements and evolutionary determinants of genomic divergence between paired primary and metastatic tumors' (PLoS Computational Biology, 2021), 'Quantitative evidence for early metastatic seeding in colorectal cancer' (Nature Genetics, 2019), 'Promoter of lncRNA gene PVT1 is a tumor-suppressor DNA boundary element' (Cell, 2018), 'Between-region genetic divergence reflects the mode and tempo of tumor evolution' (Nature Genetics, 2017), and 'A population genetics perspective on the determinants of intra-tumor heterogeneity' (Biochimica et Biophysica Acta - Reviews on Cancer, 2017). His contributions advance mechanistic understanding of tumor evolution and its clinical implications through collaborative, interdisciplinary approaches.