At age 17, Su was enrolled in the Department of Physics, Peking University, but he transferred to the Department of Geophysics in 1959. Then he transferred to the newly established Department of Astronomy in the next year, and graduated from there in 1963.[2][3]
In 1991, Su was sent to Buenos Aires as a member of the Chinese Astronomical Society delegation to the 21st IAU General Assembly.[4]
Su successively served as the secretary general of the Chinese Astronomical Society, the deputy director of Purple Mountain Observatory and the deputy director of Beijing Observatory.[1] Besides the astrophysics, Su also made important contributions to the development of Chinese astronomical instruments and took a post of adjunct research fellow at Nanjing Institute of Astronomical Optics & Technology (NIAOT).[5]