About me

Hi, I’m Su Sun — a postdoctoral scientific software engineer at Northeastern University. I work at the intersection of reaction mechanism discovery, chemical systems simulation, and scientific software engineering.

I maintain the Cantera MATLAB interface, and I care about making powerful open-source scientific software usable — and stay usable — from the tools that engineers and educators actually reach for.

What I work on

  • Cantera MATLAB toolbox — a modern, object-oriented MATLAB interface to Cantera’s thermodynamics, transport, and chemical kinetics models, rebuilt through two major architectural overhauls and adopted by the community with 14k+ downloads.
  • Automated reaction mechanism generation — contributions to the open-source RMG-Py and ReactionMechanismSimulator (RMS) ecosystems for electrochemistry and CVD applications, spanning Python and Julia.
  • Agent-assisted software workflows — orchestrating multi-stage development processes (source-code generation, code-quality checks, unit testing, packaging, release, and distribution) for scientific computing, including work to reduce a custom-compiled interface to a single-click install and to cut runtime overhead substantially.

This project

As a 2026 URSSI Fellow, I’m investigating whether agentic AI workflows can reliably maintain cross-language scientific software interfaces. You can read the project introduction or follow the timeline.

Background

  • Ph.D., Chemical Engineering, Northeastern University — 2025
  • M.S., Materials Science, University of Southern California — 2017
  • B.S., Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology — 2015

My doctoral dissertation, Toward Automated Reaction Mechanism Generation for Electrocatalytic CO₂ Conversion, Boron Nitride CVD, and Beyond, focused on automated reaction mechanism generation for electrocatalysis and thin-film chemistry.

Elsewhere

This work was supported by the US Research Software Sustainability Institute (URSSI) via grant G-2022-19347 from the Sloan Foundation.