THCA Welcomes New Faculty Member Prof. Xuening Bai
Prof. Bai comes to Tsinghua from Harvard University, where he was a research associate and a lecturer at Institute for Theory and Computation, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He was an undergraduate student at Tsinghua in the academic talent program (基础科学班) from 2003 to 2007, when he was a student member of THCA. He received his PhD in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University in 2012, where he was awarded the Charlotte E. Proctor Honorific Fellowship in 2011, an honor conferred on only the most distinguished PhD students at Princeton. He won the prestigious Hubble fellowship for which he chose the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics as the host.
Prof. Bai’s research interest spans a broad range of topics in theoretical and computational astrophysics. Prof. Bai is a leading expert in the field of protoplanetary disks and planet formation, and he aims to build the most realistic models of protoplanetary disks (where planets form), and to explore the physics and chemistry of planet formation under most realistic conditions. He has also worked extensively in high energy and plasma astrophysics, including accretion disks, disk winds and jets, pulsar physics, cosmic-ray acceleration, transport and feedback, etc. Most of his research involves the development and utilization of advanced computational tools, particularly magnetohydrodynamics (fluid) and particle-in-cell (particle) methods, on high-performance computing systems.
At Tsinghua, Prof. Bai is appointed as a faculty member (研究员) at the Institute for Advanced Study (IASTU), and is jointly affiliated with THCA, starting from August 2017. We look forward to his contributions to the growth and development of astrophysics at Tsinghua.