About me

I am an astronomer specializing in astronomical polarimetry, supernovae, cosmic dusts, astronomical site surveys, exoplanets, astronomical transients, and cosmology. From 1981 to 1986 I studied electric engineering in the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) as an undergraduate student, but switched to astronomy and astrophysics afterwards under a joint PhD program between European Southern Observatory (ESO) and Chinese Academy of Sciences (1986-1993). In 1994, I became a postdoc to work with Dr. J. C. Wheeler (U. Texas) and later became a Hubble Fellow at University at Texas at Austin. In 2000, I moved to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL) to work with Dr. Saul Perlmutter (who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2011) on the Supernova Cosmology Project (SCP). I joined the faculty of Texas A&M University in 2006 and have been a professor there since.

Among the many research interests of mine is a project I initiated in 2006 to build an astronomical observatory at Dome A, Antarctica. In 2006, the Chinese Center for Antarctic Astronomy (CCAA) was established for which I had been the director from 2006-2017. An international collaboration on Antarctic astronomy consisting of astronomers from China, Australia, US, and several countries in Europe was formed following the establishment of CCAA. The CCAA led an astronomical site survey project of Dome A as part of the International Polar Year (IPY) launched by the International Council for Science (ICSU) and the World Meteorological Organization in 2007-2008. We acquired data that established Dome A as the best site on Earth for ground-based astronomy. In 2008, I initiated the Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3) project which became the primary scientific project for CCAA. The AST3 consists of three telescopes, two were installed in Antarctica, another one is still under construction by a collaborative effort of multiple international institutions in Australia and China and is renamed to Kunlun Infra-Red Sky Survey (KISS) in 2015. In 2017, the AST3 recorded the optical signal from GW 170817, the first gravitational wave object discovered by LIGO/VIRGO with an optical counterpart. In recent publications, it enabled discoveries of hundreds of exoplanet candidates. I am also the instigator of the Kunlun Dark Universe Telescope (KDUST), which is a project to build a 2.5 meter telescope at Dome A and is currently undergoing reviews for funding.

In 2012, together with Dr. Brian Schmidt (Vice Chancellor, Australia National University), we founded the ACAMAR consortium to facilitate collaborations on Antarctic Astronomy and the Square Kilometer Array project. Brian and I were co-chairs of ACAMAR board from 2012-2018. The community interest on ACAMAR sponsored activities has been growing steadily. Today It has its own named-postdoc and senior visitor programs. It sponsors collaborative conferences on a regular 9-month basis, and enables a large number of student exchanges between Australia and China.

In 2017, I led a team of international collaboration with about 100 collaborators to develop scientific proposals on detecting the first cosmic transients of the Universe using the James Webb Space Telescope. I am the PI of one of the two proposals submitted by the team to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) with Dr. Saul Perlmutter as a Co-PI.

In recent years, I have been working on machine learning and its applications to astronomical research. I am the founding member of the Scientific Machine Learning Lab (SciML) at Texas A&M University which includes faculties across multiple colleges of Texas A&M University. I and my students developed the Artificial Intelligence Assisted Inversion (AIAI) for Type Ia supernovae. We also applied machine learning techniques to search for clues to the progenitors of Type Ia supernovae based on over 400 million spectra of supernova host galaxies. Machine learning is rapidly becoming an indispensable tool for scientific research and the adoption is still at its infancy. I expect SciML to become an important part of research activities of Texas A&M University in the upcoming years.

I am also the PI of a Texas A&M University internally funded project on Signs Of Life on Earth (SOLE). This project collaborates with faculties from Atmospheric Science and Aerospace Engineering to develop new concepts for the search for Earth-like planets in the Universe. In this study, we will treat Earth as an exoplanet and develop models and experiments that will help us to observe Earth-like planets that are light years away.