Shuo Zhang
Assistant Professor of Physics
Primary Academic Program: Physics
Biography:
Shuo Zhang comes to Bard after serving as a postdoctoral scholar and Heising-Simons Fellow at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. She received her PhD in physics at Columbia University, where her research focused on high-energy X-ray observations of the Galactic Center and Galactic Plane using the NuSTAR space telescope. The thesis, “Investigating the Physics of Hard X-ray Outbursts from the Galactic Center Supermassive Black Hole Sgr A*,” was selected for funding by NASA headquarters via the NASA Earth and Space Fellowship program. Professor Zhang has obtained funding for an original particle astrophysics project on probing galactic cosmic-ray particles at MeV through PeV energy scales using innovative methods. This research has far-reaching implications for a range of fields of study: the origin of galactic cosmic-rays, particle acceleration mechanisms, and dark matter searches. At MIT, she led a project on the discovery of a 40 keV hard X-ray source at merely 1 parsec from the Galactic Center supermassive black hole. In addition to her research, she is a referee for Nature, monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, and a panel reviewer for NASA’s Astrophysics Data Analysis Project. She is also a member of several scientific collaborations, including Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Multiwavelength Working Group, eXTP Space Telescope Observatory Science Working Group, Chandra/ACIS Instrument Team, and NuSTAR Space Telescope Science Team, among others. Her work has appeared frequently in Astrophysical Journal and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.BS, Tsinghua University; PhD, Columbia University. At Bard since 2020.
Contact:
Phone: 845-758-7059Email:
Location: Rose Science Laboratories
Office: 116