Sun Yanping is the Chinese Director of the Confucius Institute at PUC-Rio (2022–present) and an Associate Professor in the History Department at Hebei University (2007–present). She earned her Ph.D. in History from Beijing Normal University in 2007 and was a visiting scholar at Leipzig University (2014–2015).

Her research spans cultural history, urban history, and ancient Greek and Roman history. She has published over a dozen academic papers and translated several significant English-language monographs into Chinese, including:

1. Thucydides Mythistoricus by Francis Cornford
2. Before and After Socrates by Francis Cornford
3. The Great Divide: History and Human Nature in the Old World and the New by Peter Watson
4. Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine by Jim Downs