About Me

I am a final year astronomy and astrophysics PhD student at the Australian National University, with many years of teaching experience in both computer science and physics/astronomy. I was born in China but have lived in Australia for most of my life, which means I am fluent in English and conversational in Mandarin. I spend most of my spare time playing games and reading books, but sometimes I like applying programming techniques to random things like using a clustering algorithm to create a png image to ASCII art converter. My life’s goal is to automate everything.

My Research

I work on Galactic archaeology – measuring the chemical composition of stars in the Milky Way to understand it’s formation and evolution. I make 3D non-local thermodynamic equilibrium models of stellar spectra; and apply these models both to high fidelity spectra, and to medium resolution surveys. I use bayesian statistics and machine learning techniques to provide abundances with better precision and accuracy, faster.