Dr. Sung received his M.D. from South Korea. He obtained his Ph.D. in the Department of Clinical Oriented Anatomy and Functional Histology, University of Yeungnam. Following his Ph.D., he did his postdoctoral research at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) in the laboratory of Dr. Gou Young Koh. In 2006, he moved to Toronto and joined the laboratory of Dr. Andras Nagy in the Tanenbaum-Lunenfeld Research Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital. In 2014, he established his research laboratory in the Translational Medicine Program at the Hospital for Sick Children Research Institute and the University of Toronto. 

The research of Dr. Sung's laboratory is focused on investigating 1) the role of adipose tissue in metabolism and 2) the impact of dietary intervention on the regulation of adipose tissue function and whole-body metabolic homeostasis. Dr. Sung's lab recently reported that intermittent fasting (IF), a periodic energy restriction diet regimen, protects animals from high fat diet-induced obesity and metabolic abnormalities through brown fat-like changes (browning) in white fat and activation of anti-inflammatory macrophages. They found that the beneficial effects of IF were mediated by adipose-VEGF expression. Dr. Sung's research team is conducting this research using multidisciplinary approaches. This includes advanced mouse genetic models and human fat samples, in vivo metabolic phenotyping system, high throughput single-cell analysis, and cutting-edge 3D tissue clearing/visualization technology.