Yuan Sen Ting

Research Interests

My research group tackles the most challenging aspects of astrophysics in light of large data sets. My work draws heavily on a combination of theoretical modeling, statistical inferences, and machine learning. I use these tools to provide new innovative angles and shed light on the most fundamental questions of star formation, galactic evolution, the formation of black holes, and cosmology. I primarily work on the Milky Way, capitalizing on a wide range of on-going large-scale surveys and most key future surveys in the next decade. I am an “end-to-end” large survey-oriented scientist – I develop novel machine learning methods to maximally harness information in the data, build theoretical models, and confront them with observation via statistical inference.

Homepage:

https://www.ysting.space

Media Presence:

TED Video: How do we measure distances in space

https://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-do-we-measure-distances-in-space-yuan-sen-ting

TED Video: How do we study the stars

https://ed.ted.com/lessons/how-do-we-measure-distances-in-space-yuan-sen-ting

Selected OpEds

Hollywood Science Fiction: Lost in Space

https://www.sinchew.com.my/?p=3042247

One World, Two Skies: The Bifurcation of the Sky by Technology

https://www.sinchew.com.my/?p=2975642

Biography

I was born and grew up near Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia, and my hometown is a beautiful riverside village known as Sibu. Since high school, I have been pursuing my education on different continents and in various cultures, adding another self to the growing body of my work. The process started when I undertook a concurrent, double-degree program from the National University of Singapore, and Ecole Polytechnique, in France. I moved to the United States to pursue a Ph.D. in astrophysics at Harvard University, funded by a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship. After earning my doctorate in 2017, I was honored to be the first scholar awarded a joint-fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Princeton University, and Carnegie Observatory (and a NASA Hubble Fellowship). Two years after, I was appointed a continuing faculty position at the Australian National University in Canberra. After the havoc due to the pandemic, I joined the school in 2021 and have been here since.