Dr. Yuan, Zhen
My name is Zhen Yuan 袁珍, I was born in 蘇州 (Suzhou, the state of fish and rice) and have been living in the Jupyter world since 2013. As a multi-planetary human being, Suzhou dialect is my mother language, and Python is my native language, in which I can express myself the best. I use Mandarin and English as working languages, and speak surviving-level French in my daily life.
My Path to becoming an Astronomer
I have been obsessed with Physics since high school, and was aiming to do theoretical particle physics research in my PhD, but ended up doing a project about modelling the chemical evolution of dwarf galaxies in a nuclear-astrophysics group. What I got from my PhD are two interests: dwarf galaxies and r-process, which now become my main research focus. The third interest I caught during that period is Machine Learning. I still remember the enthusiasm of entering this new world when AlphaGO was announced. For a very long time, I feel that life is full of exciting stuffs but have little idea what I want to dedicated to.
One day in Nov 2016, I met an N-body simulator who told me about Gaia, and the potential to use machine learning tools to search for dwarf galaxy streams. I could not stop thinking about this idea that connects my two obsessions: dwarf galaxies and ML, and I could not imagine it changed my life path ever since. I started to develop StarGO (Stars' Galactic Origin) at the end of 2016 and made it work with mock data in three months. After Gaia DR2 came out in April 2018, I applied StarGO to various datasets and discovered new stellar streams and substructures.
Coming from the nuclear astrophysics background, my research interests naturally come towards understanding r-process element enrichment in dwarf galaxies. These stellar debris are fossils from the ancient Universe and have little metal content (so called low-metallicity stars). I have been working on obtaining high-resolution spectra for these stars using telescopes around the world with an ultimate goal of decoding nucleosynthesis and galaxy evolution at the beginning of the Universe. Very luckily, I joined the Pristine survey collaboration in 2020, which is dedicated to find low-metallicity stars in the Milky Way. Attracted by the largest treasure box of very metal poor stars in the world and the wonderland of streams, I came to Strasbourg Observatory in March 2021.
My adventure in Astronomy started with the most fun data challenge created by Gaia. Ever since, I have been exploring and constantly amazed by the old school Astronomy, especially those moments of collecting photons from stars in telescopes. All of these experiences let me decide to continue my journey in the Local Group, the place where we can look at stars 🤩