I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Astronomy at Tsinghua University. From Mar 2024 to Nov 2025, I was an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong. Prior to that, I was a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Observatories and a Henry Norris Russell Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. I began my graduate studies at UC Santa Cruz and completed my PhD at Harvard University.
I am a specialist in stellar population synthesis modeling, spectroscopic observations and reduction. My research focuses on galaxy formation and seeks to understand the physical mechanisms driving the complicated interplay between star formation and galaxy mass assembly. I work on several open issues: What is the stellar initial mass function of galaxies, how does it vary globally and locally, and how does it affect mass measurements? What is the influence of environments on galaxy formation and evolution? How do massive galaxies grow, and what can we learn from the spatial distribution of their stellar populations? I have used observations from Magellan, VLT, and SDSS-IV to tackle these questions, and I continue to pursue them with next-generation facilities including JWST and the Subaru/PFS survey.
The stellar initial mass function (IMF) determines the relative number of stars of different initial mass in a star formation event, and affects our conversion of light to mass. Using optical to near-infrared spectroscopy of galaxies in the MASSIVE survey, I measure the IMF in galaxy centers and how it varies with radius within individual galaxies, testing whether the IMF is universal and how strongly it biases stellar-population and mass estimates.
Interpreting galaxy spectra and understanding their ages, elemental abundances, and IMF relies on stellar population synthesis modeling. I develop and apply these tools. alfpy is an open-source Python translation of the Absorption Line Fitter (alf), making detailed stellar population modeling more efficient.
The most massive galaxies are built largely through mergers and accretion, a history recorded in the ages and elemental abundances of their stellar populations. Combining deep spectroscopy with the IllustrisTNG simulations, I study how brightest cluster galaxies and massive early-type galaxies assemble. We find that massive galaxies grow by preferentially accreting high-[α/Fe] systems, distinct from the general low-mass population.
Much of the evidence for galaxy assembly sits at low surface brightness: tidal shells, intracluster light, stellar halos, and ultra-diffuse galaxies. I push spectroscopy and imaging into this faint regime. We spectroscopically confirmed three ultra-diffuse galaxies in the Coma cluster to be old and metal-poor, constrained the build-up of the intracluster light in Coma, and used a system of faint shells in NGC 4889 to infer the mass ratio of a minor merger.
Publications
Recent work. The complete list is on ADS and ORCID.