​Pre Gaia

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The journey starts with my teenage obsession with physics in high school. I had the opportunity to learn physics experiments in preparation for the National competition in Physics at Nanjing University, which I joined later for my undergraduate studies. Through interactions with researchers in the Department of physics, mathematics, and the Purple mountain observatory, I gained countless inspirations and also was exposed to a realm concepts like string theory that my advisor first led me to 🧐

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I began my PhD in Minnesota, U.S., initially aiming to pursue theoretical particle physics. Yet life had other plans: I joined a nuclear astrophysics group instead. While studying the chemical evolution of the Fornax dwarf galaxy, my research interests shifted toward understanding how the first galaxies are formed and how elements are made within them. This period also coincided with the dawn of the machine learning revolution, sparked by breakthroughs like AlphaGo. Life, as always, was full of unexpected turns—though at the time, I had little clarity about what path to dedicate myself to 🤷🏻‍♀️

 

After Gaia

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The click happened during my first postdoc. Someday in November 2016, I met an N-body simulation expert who introduced me to the Gaia mission, which measures motions of billions of stars and the data is open to everyone immediately after it is ready. We were thrilled by the potential to use machine learning tools to search for dwarf galaxy streams hidden in Gaia’s oceans of stellar data 🤩

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Inspired, I immediately began developing StarGO (Stars’ Galactic Origin), a neural-network-based method to search for dwarf galaxy streams. After successfully testing it on mock simulations, I applied StarGO to Gaia DR2 right after it came out in April 2018, and discovered new stellar streams and substructures from Milky Way’s ancient mergers. Gaia revolutionized the field of Galactic Archeology and changed my life 🥳

 

After identifying these ancient stellar debris, I became driven to understand how their progenitors formed and evolved over cosmic time. Guided by this curiosity, I immersed myself in observations, and started to obtain spectra for old, low-metallicity stars using telescopes around the world. At the same time, very luckily, I joined the Pristine Survey collaboration—a team dedicated to hunting the Milky Way’s most pristine, low-metallicity stars since 2017. Attracted by the world’s largest treasure trove of very metal-poor stars and the largest wonderland of stellar streams, I came to the Strasbourg Observatory in March 2021. There, I joined the Galactic Archaeology group and connected with a vibrant network of Galactic archaeologists across Europe 🙂

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My adventure in Astronomy started with the most fun data challenge offered by Gaia. Ever since, I have been exploring around and constantly amazed by the old school Astronomy, especially those moments of gathering photons from ancient stars in telescopes at remote summits. All of these experiences let me decide to continue my journey in the Local Group, the place where we can observe stars 🤩