What I do

Nuclear rings host the brightest stars and most intense star formation at the centers of barred galaxies. They are like wreaths decorating the hearts of galaxies, knitted by material flowing from the galaxy outskirts to the central super-massive black holes through the bars. They are the perfect lab to study the star formation cycle, especially stellar feedback. I grew strong interests in these beautiful structures, and led successful VLA proposal to observe the 33 GHz free-free emission of nearby nuclear rings, with unprecedented resolution. Now I am building a VLA+JWST campaign to get a mutl-wavelength view of star formation in a sample of 10 nuclear rings.

During my PhD studies at Trottier Space Institute, McGill University, in Prof. Daryl Haggard's group, I worked on characterizing star formation efficiency (SFE) around the center of galaxies, with observations from SITELLE at CFHT and ALMA. This is part of the WISDOM project. I led several successful SITELLE proposals that were fruitful in giving us observations of 8 galaxies. The complete sample and two pilot studies were published.

My full publication list can be found here.

From 2018 to 2020, I worked at the Aerodynamics Lab at McGill University, studying ground effect of aircrafts, supervised by Prof. Tim Lee. We did experiments to measure the behavior of wingtip vortices in ground effect with different boundary conditions and wing designs. I helped to build this set-up of moving belt with laser velocimetry that could measure and visualize wingtip vortices. (Thesis)

As an undergraduate student at McGill University, I worked with Prof. Xinyu Liu (at University of Toronto now) developing various types of micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS). I was involved in projects developing paper-based nanowire sensors and 3D printable electronically conductive materials.