Shunqiao Sun

Assistant Professor

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Alabama
Office: North Engineering Research Center (NERC), Room 3009
Phone: 205-348-0508
E-mail: shunqiao.sun [at] ua.edu
Mailing address: Box 870286, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487

Openings

I am looking for MULTIPLE self-motivated Ph.D. students to join our research group, working on cutting edge automotive radar technology for autonomous driving, radar/RF remote sensing and digital health. Prior research experience on radar algorithms and systems, spectrum analysis, signal processing and machine learning, RF interference mitigation and related fields are desirable. Feel free to send me an email along with your CV if you are interested. However, I apologize in advance that I am not able to reply to all inquiries.

​​Biography

Dr. Sun received his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from Rutgers in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in January 2016. He is currently a tenure-track assistant professor after joining the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at The University of Alabama in August 2019. From 2016-2019, he was with the radar core team of Aptiv, Technical Center Malibu, California, where he has worked on advanced radar signal processing and machine learning algorithms for self-driving vehicles and lead the development of direction-of-arrival estimation techniques for next-generation short-range radar sensor which has been used in over 120-million automotive radar units. His research interests lie at the interface of statistical and sparse signal processing with mathematical optimizations, automotive radar, MIMO radar, machine learning, and smart sensing for autonomous vehicles.

Dr. Sun received the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award (2024) and CRII Award (2022).  He received the 2016 IEEE Aerospace and Electronics Systems Society (AESS) Robert T. Hill Best Dissertation Award for his thesis “MIMO radar with Sparse Sensing”. He authored a paper that won the Best Student Paper Award at 2020 IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop (SAM). He is an elected member of IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel (SAM) Technical Committee (2024-2026), and an elected member of IEEE SPS Integrated Sensing and Communication Technical Working Group (2025-2027).  He is Vice Chair of IEEE Signal Processing Society (SPS) Autonomous Systems Initiative (ASI) (2023-2025). He has co-organized the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Workshop on Signal Processing for Autonomous Systems (SPAS) at International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP) 2023 in Rhodes, Greece, ICASSP 2024 in Seoul, Korea, and European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO) 2025 in Palermo, Italy, respectively. He has co-organized 15 special/focused sessions on automotive radar signal processing, machine learning and sparse arrays at IEEE SPS and AESS flagship conferences. He is an Associate Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters and IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing. He is a Senior Member of IEEE.

​[CV.pdf] 

Research Interests

My research lies at the interface of statistical and sparse signal processing with mathematical optimizations, MIMO radar, machine learning with applications emphasis on 

• Radar Signal Processing and Machine Learning for Autonomous Driving and Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS)
• Radar Remote Sensing for Global Climate Change
• Radio Frequency (RF) Sensing for Digital Health​​​ and Smart Home

Honors and Awards

• University of Alabama Hewson Engineering Faculty Fellows (2025)
• NSF CAREER Award (2024)
• NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) Award (2022)
• Best Student Paper Award at IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop (SAM) (as coauthor, 2020)
• IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society Robert T. Hill Best Dissertation Award (2016)
• Rutgers University ECE Department Graduate Program Academic Achievement Award (2015-2016)

News

• Jan. 2025: Dr. Sun was selected as a member of 2025 University of Alabama Hewson Engineering Faculty Fellows 
• Nov. 2024: Dr. Sun is elected to be a member of IEEE SPS Integrated Sensing and Communication Technical Working Group (ISAC TWG) for period of 2025-2027
• ​Nov. 14, 2024: Lifan Xu successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation on “Towards Adaptive Collaborative Next Generation Automotive Radar”.
• Nov. 4, 2024: Ruxin Zheng successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation on “Model-Based Knowledge-Driven Machine Learning for Automotive Radar Imaging and Perception”.
• Oct. 18, 2024: visited Lehigh University to give a seminar on “Redefining Millimeter-Wave Automotive Radar for Autonomous Driving: Advanced Signal Processing and Machine Learning Approaches”.
• Sept. 19, 2024: visited Auburn University to give a seminar on “Recent advances in automotive radar signal processing for autonomous driving”.
• Aug. 2024: Ruonan Yang joins our lab as a Ph.D. student. Ruonan has received the 2024-2025 graduate council fellowship from The University of Alabama.
• July 2024: Lifan’s second journal paper on “Reconfigurable beamforming for automotive radar sensing and communication: A deep reinforcement learning approach,” has been accepted by IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Sensors for publication.
• July 2024: Congratulations to Lifan for winning IEEE SPS student travel grant to attend IEEE SAM Workshop 2024.
• May 2024: Congratulations to Lifan and Yunqiao for starting research internships at NXP Semiconductors in the summer of 2024.
• March 2024: Invited to give an IEEE SPS webinar together with Prof. Athina Petropulu and Prof. H. Vincent Poor on ‘‘The Past, Present and Future of Automotive Radar for Active Safety and Autonomous Driving”, on June 4, 2024.
• March 2024: our IEEE SPM feature article on “MIMO radar for advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous driving: Advantages and challenges” has been identified as being one of the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s top 25 downloaded articles from Sept. 2022 – Sept. 2023 for IEEE Signal Processing Magazine on IEEE Xplore®.
• March 2024: Dr. Sun has been awarded the NSF CAREER Award
• Jan. 2024:  our work on “Widely separated MIMO radar using matrix completion,” has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Radar Systems for publication.
• Jan. 2024: our IEEE SPM feature article on “MIMO radar for advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous driving: Advantages and challenges” is the most cited MIMO radar paper in IEEEXplore in the past 3 years, according to the overview paper, ‘‘20 Years of MIMO Radar”, ​published in IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine. 

• Dec. 2023: two our special session proposals on ‘‘Automotive Radar Signal Processing for Autonomous Vehicles” (co-organized with Dr. Tai Fei) and ‘‘Exploiting Sparsity in Sensor Arrays and Signal Waveforms” (co-organized with Prof. Yimin D. Zhang), have been accepted by IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop (SAM), July 2024.
• Dec. 2023: Yunqiao’s paper on ‘‘IHT-inspired neural network for single-snapshot DOA estimation with sparse linear arrays,” has been accepted for presentation at IEEE ICASSP 2024
• Nov. 2023: Ruxin’s second journal paper on “Interpretable and efficient beamforming-based deep learning for single snapshot DOA estimation,” has been accepted by IEEE Sensors Journal.
• Nov. 10, 2023: invited to give a seminar on ‘‘Automotive Radar for Autonomous Driving: Signal Processing Meets Deep Learning” jointly at TU Delft and IEEE Benelux Section
• Oct. 31, 2023: co-organized and co-chaired the special session on ‘‘Recent Advances in Signal Processing Approaches for Automotive Radar and Networks” at IEEE Asilomar Conference in Pacific Grove, CA
• Oct. 2023: elected to be member of IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel (SAM) Technical Committee 
• Sept. 19-20, 2023: visited TU Delft, The Netherlands and gave seminars on ‘‘Automotive Radar for Autonomous Driving: Signal Processing Meets Deep Learning”
• Sept. 18, 2023: invited to give a talk on ‘‘Automotive Radar for Autonomous Driving: Signal Processing Meets Deep Learning” at the Automotive Forum in European Microwave Week (EuMW) in Berlin, Germany.
• Sept. 6, 2023: co-organized the “Special Session on Advanced Signal Processing Approaches for High-Resolution Automotive Radar Systems”, IEEE European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Helsinki, Finland
• Sept. 5, 2023: visited GM Cruise Munich, Germany and gave a talk on ‘‘Automotive Radar for Autonomous Driving: Signal Processing Meets Deep Learning” 
• Aug. 2023: Daodao Liu and Haodong Li joined our lab as Ph.D. students
• July 2023: our Satellite Workshop proposal for the Intl. Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), April 14-19, 2024, Seoul, Korea, entitled “The Second Workshop on Signal Processing for Autonomous Systems (SPAS)” has been accepted. 
• July 2023: Lifan’s first journal paper on ‘‘Automotive FMCW radar with difference co-chirps​,’’ has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems.
• July 2023: appointed as Associated Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters
• June 2023: Invited to give an IEEE SPS webinar together with Prof. Yimin D. Zhang on “Redefining Radar Perception for Autonomous Driving: The Role of Sparse Array and Waveform Design in 4D Automotive Radar,” on Sept. 26, 2023.
• June 14, 2023: visited Aptiv, Wuppertal, Germany and gave a talk on ‘‘Automotive Radar for Autonomous Driving: Signal Processing Meets Deep Learning” 
• June 12, 2023: visited Hella, Lippstadt, Germany and gave a talk on ‘‘Automotive Radar for Autonomous Driving: Signal Processing Meets Deep Learning” 
• ​June 5, 2023: Co-organized ​Workshop on Signal Processing for Autonomous Systems (SPAS) at ICASSP 2023 in Rhodes, Greece.
• May 2023: our work on “4D automotive radar sensing for autonomous vehicles: A sparsity-oriented approach” has been identified as being one of the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s top 25 downloaded articles from Sept. 2021 – Sept. 2022 for IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing on IEEE Xplore®.
• May 2023: Ruxin’s paper on “Deep learning based computationally efficient unrolling IAA for direction-of-arrival estimation,” has been accepted for publication in European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Helsinki, Finland, Sept. 4-8, 2023.
• May 2023: our paper on “1 + 1 is greater than 2: Collaborative automotive radar imaging exploiting spatial diversity,” has been accepted for presentation in European Radar Conference (EuRAD), Berlin, Germany, Sept. 20-22, 2023.
• May 2023: Ruxin’s first journal paper on ‘‘Deep neural networks-enabled vehicle detection using high-resolution automotive radar imaging,’’ has been accepted by IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems.
• May 1-5, 2023: Co-organize and co-chair the Special Session on Advanced Signal Processing Approaches for Next Generation Automotive Radar, at IEEE Radar Conference 2023, in San Antonio, TX.
• April 2023: Congratulations to Lifan Xu and Ruxin Zheng, who will be joining NXP Semiconductors and Mathworks respectively as research interns in the summer of 2023.
• April 13, 2023: visited University of California, Davis and gave a seminar on ‘‘Automotive Radar for Autonomous Driving: Signal Processing Meets Deep Learning” 
• April 12, 2023: visited University of California, Irvine and gave a seminar on ‘‘Automotive Radar for Autonomous Driving: Signal Processing Meets Deep Learning” 
• April 3, 2023: visited University of Illinois Chicago and gave a seminar on ‘‘Automotive Radar for Autonomous Driving: Signal Processing Meets Deep Learning” 
• Mar. 2023: appointed as Associated Editor of IEEE Open Journal of Signal Processing
• Mar. 2023: received extended research contract from NXP Semiconductors for ‘‘Advanced Automotive Radar Signal Processing Research” (PI: $440K).
• Jan. 2023: three papers from our group have been accepted for publication at IEEE Radar Conference 2023.
• Jan. 2023: Yunqiao Hu joined our lab as a Ph.D. student
• Nov. 2022: received extended research contract from Spartan Radar for automotive radar research (PI: $100K).
• Nov. 2022: elected as the Vice-Chair of the IEEE Autonomous Systems Initiative (ASI) Steering Committee of the IEEE Signal Processing Society for the term 1/1/2023 – 12/30/2024.
• Nov. 2022: Ruxin Zheng presented our research on ‘‘A deep learning approach for Doppler unfolding in automotive TDM MIMO radar” at Asilomar conference, Pacific Grove, California.
• June 2022: Co-organize a Special Session on ‘‘Advanced Signal Processing Methods in Automotive Radar Sensing for Autonomous Vehicles” at 2022 IEEE SAM workshop in Trondheim, Norway
• April 2022: Congratulations to Ruxin Zheng, who will be joining Mathworks as a research intern in the summer of 2022.
• April 2022: Received extended research contract from NXP Semiconductors for ‘‘Advanced Automotive Radar Signal Processing Research” (PI: $170K).
• Mar. 2022: Received the NSF Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) Research Initiation Initiative (CRII) award. The project topic is ‘‘CRII: CIF: A Sparse Framework Based Automotive Radar Sensing for Autonomous Vehicles’’. 
• Jan. 2022: Received research contract of $78K from Spartan Radar for automotive radar research
• Nov. 2021: Received research gift of $73K from Mathworks, Inc for automotive radar research
• Aug. 2021: Yining Wen joined our lab as a Ph.D. student
• Aug. 11-13, 2021: Lifan Xu presented our research results on ‘‘Difference co-chirps-based non-uniform PRF automotive FMCW radar,’’ at IEEE International Conference on Autonomous Systems (ICAS), Montréal, Québec, Canada
• June 6-11, 2021: Co-organize and co-chair of a Special Session on ‘‘Recent Advances in mmWave Radar Sensing for Autonomous Vehicles’’ at ICASSP 2021, Toronto, Canada
• June 2021: Received seed funding from The Alabama Transportation Institute (ATI) for ‘‘Laboratory for Intelligent Sensing and Computing” (PI: $50K)
• May 2021: IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing: ‘‘4D automotive radar sensing for autonomous vehicles: A sparsity-oriented approach”.
• May 2021: Received extended research contract from NXP Semiconductors for ‘‘Advanced Automotive Radar Signal Processing Research” (PI: $69K).
• May 2021: Received funding from The Alabama Transportation Institute (ATI) for Graduate Student Support for 2021-2022 Academic Year.
• Mar. 2021: Congratulations to Lifan Xu, who will be joining NXP Semiconductors as a research intern in the summer of 2021.
• Jan. 2021: Ruxin Zheng joined our lab as a Ph.D. student.
• Sept. 2020: Received one-year research contract from NXP Semiconductors for ‘‘Advanced Automotive Radar Signal Processing Research” (PI: $80K).
• Aug. 2020: Lifan Xu joined our lab as a Ph.D. student. Lifan was selected for a one-year Graduate Council Fellowship. 
• July 2020: IEEE Signal Processing Magazine feature article: “MIMO radar for advanced driver-assistance systems and autonomous driving: Advantages and challenges”.
• June 2020: Congratulations to Shuimei Zhang for winning the Best Student Paper Award for our collaborative paper, titled “DOA Estimation Exploiting Interpolated Multi-frequency Sparse Array,” at IEEE Sensor Array and Multichannel Signal Processing Workshop (SAM), Hangzhou, China, June 8-11, 2020.
• May 4-8, 2020: Co-organize and co-chair of a Special Session on ‘‘Recent Advances in Automotive Radar Systems’’ at ICASSP 2020, Barcelona, Spain
• Nov. 3-6, 2019: Co-organize and co-chair of a Special Session on Automotive Radar at 2019 Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers​
• Sept. 2019: Received a one-year NOAA/UCAR and U.S. Dept. of Commerce grant for ‘‘Center for Remote Sensing of Snow and Soil Moisture’’ (Co-PI, $250K, total $5M, PI: Dr. Prasad Gogineni).
• April 22-26, 2019: Co-chair the session on Distributed MIMO and present our paper ‘‘Target estimation by exploiting low rank structure in widely separated MIMO radar’’ at IEEE Radar Conference 2019
• Mar. 29, 2019: Invited to give a talk on ‘‘The Advantages and Challenges of MIMO Radar for Autonomous Driving’’ at California State University, Long Beach
• July 24, 2018: Invited to give an IEEE Communications Society (ComSoc) webinar on ‘‘MIMO Radar and Its Role in Autonomous Driving’’
• April 2018: Elected to IEEE Senior Member
• Mar. 19, 2018: Invited to give a talk on ‘‘Make Self-Driving Cars See! The Key MIMO Radar Technology for Autonomous Driving’’ at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI
• Nov. 28, 2017: Invited to give the second talk on ‘‘MIMO Radar: Fundamentals, Sparse Sensing and its Application in Autonomous Driving (Part II)’’ at IEEE Buenaventura Section Seminar, Skyworks Solutions, Newbury Park, CA
• ​Sept. 26, 2017: Invited to give the first talk on ‘‘MIMO Radar: Fundamentals, Sparse Sensing and its Application in Autonomous Driving (Part I)’’ at IEEE Buenaventura Section Seminar, Skyworks Solutions, Newbury Park, CA
• May 2017: Received the 2016 IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Society Robert T. Hill Best Dissertation Award