Associate Professor, Vice Chair
Introduction:
Zheng Cai is a tenured Associate Professor and doctoral supervisor in the Department of Astronomy at Tsinghua University, Director of the Deep Space Technology Center, and principle investigator (PI) of the MUltiplexed Survey Telescope (MUST) project. He received his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Arizona in 2015, was named a NASA Hubble Fellow in 2016, and joined Tsinghua in June 2019. His research centers on AI-empowered astronomy and next-generation instrumentation. He has made a series of advances in observations of high-redshift galaxies, large-scale structure, and the intergalactic and circumgalactic medium. For example, launching the MAMMOTH survey, discovering the most luminous enormous Lyman-alpha nebula, and the first direct imaging of recycled gas streams spiraling into a massive galaxy in early universe. AI denoising model ASTERIS, now widely adopted by the astronomical community on telescopes across the world. He serves the panelist of several telescopes including JWST, HST. He is now leading the construction of MUST, with first light targeted around 2029, to conduct the world's first Stage-V spectroscopic cosmology survey. He received the 2024 Xplorer Prize, and his research is supported by a Category A Young Scientists Fund grant from the National Natural Science Foundation and by National Key R&D Program, among others.
