Hi, and welcome to my channel! I am a fifth-year grad student at Institute for Astronomy, University of Hawaii at Manoa. My main interests are in exoplanet studies, both from observation and instrumentation aspects.  For my 699-1 project, I worked with Dr. Daniel Huber and Dr. Lauren Weiss on characterizing exoplanets and their host stars with the radial velocity (RV) and asteroseismology. We discovered a long period giant planet using RV data from Keck/HIRES outside two transiting sub-Neptunes in a Kepler system. We also found the giant planet may tilt the orbits of two inner sub-Neptunes using asteroseismology. The paper relate to this work is https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021AJ….162…89Z/abstract.

I then worked with Dr. Michael Bottom on the simulation of observing bio-signatures of habitable planets using future space-based direct imaging telescopes such as LUVOIR or HabEx, with an imaging Fourier transform spectrograph (iFTS). Our main goal is to study the capability of the iFTS to identify key molecular lines and bands when observing extremely faint targets like Earth-like exoplanets.

I am fortunate to be able to pursue a Ph.D. degree and my dream of studying “alien worlds” in such a beautiful place. Outside of astronomy, I like reading, including but not limited to science fiction. One of my favorite books is “The Dispossessed” by Ursula Le Guin, a novel that contrasts two very different civilizations on two neighboring planets.