Research

As a member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration (EHT), we capture and analyze images of the supermassive black holes in the center of the M87 galaxy and our own Milky Way Galaxy. We continue to learn more about how gas accretes onto these black holes, and how powerful jets of particles are launched close to black holes like M87. Our work has been recognized through the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, Einstein Medal, American Astronomical Society Bruno Rossi Prize, US National Science Foundation Diamond Achievement Award, and the Royal Astronomical Society Group Achievement Award. Our first black hole image of M87 released in 2019 was listed as the Science Magazine Breakthrough of the Year, Nature Magazine Science Image of the Year, No. 1 in the Forbes space images of the year, and the No. 1 in Popular Mechanics list of scientific moments that defined the year. I have been personally involved in the array operations, observations, data processing, as well as imaging aspects of the work. I previously served as a Coordinator for the Calibration and Error Analysis Working Group in the EHT.

In my previous role as Support Astronomer at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA), I was heavily involved in the scientific commissioning and operations of the Greenland Telescope, the first astronomical observatory in the Arctic, which is jointly operated by ASIAA and the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, and in collaboration with the MIT Haystack Observatory and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. I continue to help support the observations whenever I can remotely from here in Perth.

I study how gas is funnelled into the central regions of galaxies to feed the supermassive black holes in the center. I use telescopes such as the Atacama Large Millimetre/Sub-Millimeter Array (ALMA) to observe the molecular gas traced by Carbon Monoxide (CO), as well as the dust heated up by the supermassive black hole and stars. This helps us to better understand how galaxies and their central supermassive black holes appear to grow and evolve together over cosmic history, and how black hole winds and jets may drive or shut down the formation of stars in galaxies. I am particularly interested in a class of accreting supermassive black holes called Changing-Look Active Galactic Nuclei (CL-AGN), specifically the black hole in the Mrk 590 galaxy. 

Blazars are a class of accreting supermassive black holes whose jets are pointed directly towards the Earth. We observe them as bright points of light in the sky. Just as stars twinkle in the sky due to atmospheric turbulence, these blazars also twinkle when observed through radio telescopes, due to the turbulent nature of the ionized gas in our Milky Way Galaxy. By observing and analysing the twinkling behavior of these blazars using radio telescopes such as the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA), I study the properties of the blazar jets themselves as well as that of the interstellar gas in our Galaxy.

In my previous life, I was involved in the study of how radar satellite imaging of rice fields can be used to predict the yield of rice crops. In particular, I developed theoretical models that describe how radio waves from space-based radar systems reflect and scatter off rice fields to determine what their signatures looked like in satellite images. This helps us to determine the density of the rice crops based on satellite images alone, which in turn can be used to detect diseases and predict yield.