About Me

Education: My master's degree was earned from the University of Hertfordshire in 2018: an upper-second class MPhy with honours. My favourite modules in University were those that involved the most coursework and coding. Particular highlights included: Rocket Performance and Propulsion, which thoroughly enthralled my inner six-year old who’d grown up visiting both the NASA centres in Houston and Florida numerous times; Programming and Statistics, where I learned how to more thoroughly parse through data and its meanings; and High Energy Astrophysics, where I was finally formally exposed to astrophysics.
I received my dual high school diploma from St. Paul American School Beijing in 2014, where I earned an American diploma with a 3.75 GPA (of a 4.0 scale) as well as an equivalent Chinese diploma. I had previously attended high school in Texas and Florida.

Research Interests: exoplanet atmospheres and their characterisation, machine-learning, early-Earth conditions and habitability of exoplanets

Research


As a first-year PhD, I put together a literature review, the keywords for which summarise my research interests broadly: Bayesian analysis, specifically MCMC; radiative transfer; forward modelling; retrievals. The completion of my PhD is expected to be at the latest summer 2023.
ARES Summer School:
I began my PhD by attending the ARIEL Retrieval of Exoplanets School in October 2019. During this summer school, I was introduced to the Iraclis python package and Tau-REx code, developed by UCL's Angelos Tsiaris and Ingo Waldmann. The school introduced me to the European exoplanet community, as well as allowed me to gain experience in the data reducation of Hubble Space Telescope WFC3 spectrum of transiting exoplanets and characterise their atmospheres with the Tau-REx 2 retrieval method.

Publications: Orcid Link; Papers on arXiv; Papers on ADS

Talks:

  • Speaker at ARES Day, November 18 2020

Other speaking activities:

Additional conferences and workshops I have attended so far, where you may have met me, include:

  • UKRI STFC Introductory Course in Astronomy for New Research Students--August 2019, University of Kent
  • K2-18b Workshop--November 2019, University College London
  • ARIEL: Science, Mission, and Community 2020 Conference--January 2020, ESA/ESTEC (Netherlands)
  • JWST UK Masterclass--March 2020, University of Exeter
  • Twinkle Consortium Meeting--April 2020 (Virtual)
  • ARIEL Consortium Meeting--May 2020 (Virtual)
  • Exoplanets III--July 2020 (Virtual)
  • ARIEL Consortium Meeting--February 2021 (Virtual)
  • Exoplanets-A: Exoplanet atmosphere characterization: from HST and Spitzer to JWST--March 2021
  • ARIEL Consortium Meeting--June 2021 (Virtual)

Community

Teaching: I currently demonstrate in a year-two Natural Sciences laboratory course (NSC2001) at the University of Exeter. This entails helping students prepare and understand experiments, working with them through the experiments including troubleshooting on the day of, and grading reports and presentations from students.

Outreach: I began doing outreach in my third year of university, bolstered by the experienced I'd gained in high school teaching English in a Chinese kindergarten on school afternoons and volunteering for my local library in Florida. The outreach I did at the Univeristy of Hertfordshire included organising students and staff for public evenings at Bayfordbury, and leading planetarium presentations at schools and at general public events (in both small and large planetariums, and what was, at the time, the largest inflatable planetarium in the UK!).

Equity & Inclusion: I applied for, and was selected by lecturers to be, 'SSRO' at Hertfordshire–a role wherein I represented my School and course representatives to the Student’s Union. As SSRO, I represented a wide variety of student opinions, and worked to create change in our School’s curriculum in order to promote student’s learning and well-being. I was a member of the Equality Committee and presented regularly at department meetings, including a presentation to the Vice-Chancellor and his office and Juno meetings. I met with student representatives regularly, encouraging them to address issues with lecturers and advising them on how best to tackle any course concerns, using insight from my own past two years of being student representative to do so. I believe it was both my work as Chair of my University's physics society and SSRO that led to my nomination of Vice Chancellor’s Student of the Year for PAM by the staff at PAM.