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My parents are Chinese Indonesians
who moved to the US in 1957. Since this was before
the repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a special
bill in Congress was passed to permit my dad to
immigrate. He was hired as a librarian by Cornell
University, and I was born and raised in Ithaca,
NY. We lived a few miles east of town, and although
our house was in a valley, the skies were dark.
And like other astronomers who were toddlers at
that time, I was fascinated and inspired by the
lunar landings and space program. As a teen, I watched
Carl Sagan on TV... and I also had the chance to
see him in person a couple times, since he lived
in my town!
Feels like I've come a long way
since then. My undergraduate degree is from Bryn
Mawr College outside Philadelphia, and I worked
at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA
for a couple years with the X-ray group there. While
I was helping to archive data from Einstein, an
early X-ray satellite, others around me were developing
the NASA Great Observatory that was to become the
Chandra X-ray Observatory. Little did I dream then,
that I would someday be a Guest Observer on Chandra
myself! I went on to do my graduate work at the
University of Arizona from 1988 to 1995 with Rob
Kennicutt, a pundit on galaxies. After postdoctoral
fellowships at Cambridge University in the UK and
the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore,
I'm now a staff astronomer back in Arizona, at Lowell
Observatory in Flagstaff.
My scientific interests focus on
the effects of the hottest, most massive stars on
their interstellar environment. On small scales,
these stars ionize the surrounding gas and create
spectacular and photogenic emission nebulae. They
also end their lives in powerful supernova explosions
that create shells and hot (million-degree) gas
in the interstellar medium. And these stars, along
with their supernovae, are nuclear generators that
create virtually all the elements in the Universe
apart from hydrogen and helium. Because these stars
have such a profound effect on the gas in galaxies,
they are responsible for many of the processes that
cause galaxies, and the Universe itself, to evolve.
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