Congratulations to Hua “Linda” Sun, MD, PhD, on being named one of four 2025 Stead Family Scholars. Sun, an associate professor in the Division of Nephrology, Dialysis and Transplantation, will receive $125,000 per year for three years to support her research, plus leadership and communication training to advance her professional development. 

Sun’s lab studies a heavy-duty transport system inside kidney cells. Her team was the first to discover that in diabetes, this transport network goes off course, misdelivering critical cargo, damaging cells, and ultimately causing the loss of the kidney’s filtering units. 

“Her ability to conduct highly mechanistic, hypothesis-driven studies places her among the top physician-scientists in her field," said Department Chair Alexander Bassuk, MD, PhD. 

This scholarship is helping Sun’s lab uncover how the breakdown rewires cellular metabolism and scrambles gene activity, and screen for compounds that can restore trafficking. Sun’s ultimate goal is to develop therapies that can restore—or even protect—kidney health from the earliest stages of diabetic stress, especially in children and adolescents.   

"Dr. Sun is at a particularly dynamic and promising stage of her career. I have every confidence that she will emerge as a leader in the field of diabetic nephropathy," said Bassuk.

Sun joins fellow Stead Family Scholars from the Department of Pediatrics Lyndsay Harshman, MD, MS, (2023 cohort) and Jennifer Bermick, MD, (2022 cohort).

Stead Family Scholars is generously funded by Jerre and Mary Joy Stead to support researchers whose bold ideas have the potential to transform science and medicine.