About me

I attended undergraduate school at National Taiwan University, where I majored in Physics and Life Science. I was planning to study biophysics before I signed up astronomy courses by Prof. Wei-Hsin Sun. I then made up my mind to study astronomy and was luckily accepted by Graduate Institute of Astronomy at National Central University. NCU has the oldest astronomy graduate school and hosts the largest optical telescope at the Lulin observatory in Taiwan. I worked with Prof. Wing-Huen Ip on the exoplanets for my Master thesis, which we studied both theoretical (aeronomyy and dynamical evolution) and observational (transit and microlensing) aspects of exoplanets.

I then left Taiwan for the first time and moved to Germany for my PhD studies. I attended the International Max Planck Research School on Astrophysics in Munich. I worked with Dr. Arno Riffeser, Dr. Stella Seitz, and Prof. Ralf Bender on microlensing in M31, a key project of the Pan-STARRS survey. Besides Pan-STARRS, we also used the 0.8m telescope of the Wendelstein observatory in the Bavarian Alps to monitor the bulge of M31. In addition, I travelled to south America from time to time, to carry out observations of lensing galaxy clusters and transiting exoplanets with the 2.2m Max-Planck telescope at La Silla, Chile.

After finishing my PhD, I started my first postdoc position with Prof. Wen-Ping Chen in Taiwan, where I spent half of the time participating Taiwanese Pan-STARRS working groups, especially on stellar clusters and galaxy evolution. In addition, I spent other half of my time on Palomar Transient Facotry. I collaborated with Prof. Chow-Choong Ngeow on the Palomar Transient Factory work, focusing on long-period and bright variables of M31, which are not covered by Pan-STARRS data.

I then moved to Germany for my second postdoc position. I continued my work with the Pan-STARRS M31 working group in Munich, this time focusing on short period variables, especially on Cepheids and eclipsing binaries, with the goal to establish M31 as the 4th distance anchor.

After two postdoc terms, I joined Subaru telescope as a support astronomer, primarily on Faint Object Camera and Spectrograph (FOCAS) and also serving as secondary support astronomer of Hyper Suprime-CAM (HSC). Besides supporting visiting and resident astronomers for night time observations, I also participate in the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program, an ambitious program to map 1400 squared degrees of sky with grizy down to r=26 magnitudes, taking advantage of the high etendue delivered by the 1.5-degree diameter FOV Hyper Suprime-Cam onboard the 8.2-m Subaru telescope. I was mainly involved in gravitational lensing, high-z galaxies, transients, and Galactic dwarf galaxies and dwarf stars studies utilizing the HSC-SSP data and follwing them up with the suite of instruments at Subaru, e.g. FOCAS and InfraRed Camera and Spectrograph (IRCS).

After my stint at Subaru Telescope, I joined NOIRLab as a staff scientist working on Arizona-NOIRLab Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System (ANTARES), a time-domain borker that serves the community to vet the avalanche of transient alerts delivered by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and the forth-coming Rubin Observatory's Legacy Survey of Space and Time. I also served as NOIRLab's project scientist for the Astronomical Event Observation Network that consists a fleet of 1-8m telescopes from Las Cumbres, SOAR, and Gemini for time-domain event follow-up, and will oversee the in-kind telescope acess for Rubin Observatory.

I am currently a staff astronomer at W. M. Keck Observatory.