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I have always been interested in
the physical sciences. My undergraduate major was
geophysics, but, during my senior year, I became
fascinated by the beautiful HST images and decided
that I wanted to pursue a career in observational
astronomy. I started my graduate study in astronomy
and obtained a M.S. degree at the Institute of Astronomy
of the National Central University in Taiwan. I
am currently a graduate student at the Astronomy
Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The most exciting thing during my
graduate study in Illinois has been to work with
HST images. My first research project was to search
for optical morphological evidence of supernova
remnant shocks in X-ray-bright superbubbles in the
Large Magellanic Cloud. We find that X-ray-bright
superbubbles appear more filamentary in optical
images than X-ray-faint superbubbles. DEML106 is
an X-ray-faint superbubble with a somewhat "boring"
morphology, but it contains a pair of compact HII
regions with a very interesting reflective envelope,
as reported in this Heritage release.
For my PhD thesis, I am studying
the modes of massive star formation and their energy
feedback to the interstellar medium. I am using
HST images of giant HII regions in M101 to study
the formation of clusters, and ground-based CTIO
images to study massive star formation in the Large
Magellanic Cloud. I expect to complete my PhD thesis
within the next two years.
I have recently developed a keen
interest in the hot interstellar medium in spiral
galaxies. It is sensational to compare Chandra X-ray
images with HST optical images of galaxies! However,
to work on these exciting new projects, I'd better
finish my thesis first. |
