Kohei Inayoshi Lijing Shao (邵立晶) Ke Wang (王科)
Kohei Inayoshi has received his PhD from Kyoto University in Japan in 2014. He worked at Columbia University in US as a JSPS postdoc fellow (one and half years) and as a Simons fellow (three years).
Inayoshi’s research interests are the coevolution of supermassive black holes and their host galaxies over cosmic time. He mainly studies the following topics, performing radiation hydrodynamical simulations and analytical calculations: (1) rapid growth of black holes via gas accretion; (2) the formation of massive seed black holes through the formation of the first stars in the early Universe; (3) black hole feedback effects on gas and star formation on galactic scales; (4) the formation of coalescing stellar-mass binary black holes that can be detectable as gravitational wave sources; and (5) multi-frequency gravitational wave astronomy (LIGO, LISA and PTA) to probe the cosmological evolution of massive black holes via accretion and mergers.
Lijing Shao (邵立晶) obtained a doctor degree on Theoretical Physics from Peking University in 2015, which was jointly fostered by the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn Germany. After that he spent two years as a Junior Scientist in the group Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity, Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics (Albert Einstein Institute) in Potsdam Germany, and one year as a Scientific Staff in the group Fundamental Physics in Radio Astronomy, Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn Germany.
Shao’s research interests are mainly focused on theories and phenomena in gravitational astrophysics. He uses various astrophysical observations to probe and constrain new physics beyond the General Relativity theory of gravitation and the Standard Model of particle physics. He has proposed several new tests to study strong-field gravity with gravitational waves, a variety of spacetime symmetries with pulsar timing, and the masslessness of photons with fast radio bursts. He is also interested in using gravitational waves to infer the underlying spacetime dynamics, aspects of astrophysics, and the cosmology of our Universe. He is very active in the community of gravitation, and the community of pulsar astronomy.
Ke Wang (王科) received his Ph.D. degree from Peking University in 2012, with majority of his Ph.D. study carried out at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics during a Submillimeter Array pre-doctoral fellowship. In 2011, he accepted a research grant of the European Commission and moved to the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in the Netherlands for a postdoctoral fellowship.Afterwards, he spent six years at the European Southern Observatory headquarters in Germany, first as an ESO Fellow (2012-2015), then as an Associate (2015-2018).
Ke Wang observes high-mass star formation at high-resolution. He is an expert in submillimeter interferometry and has served in the European ALMA Regional Center and the SMA operations team for more than 5 years. His research characterizes the initial conditions of high-mass star formation throughout the Galaxy by observing various samples of molecular clouds in different Galactic environments. Observations at multiple scales are made using submm/mm/cm interferometers including ALMA, SMA, and VLA, and space- and ground-based single-dish telescopes including Herschel, GBT 100m, Effelsberg 100m, Nobeyama 45m, IRAM 30m, JCMT 15m, APEX 12m, CSO 10m, and SMT 10m. Currently, he mainly works on three projects:
(1) resolving starless infrared dark clouds; he has discovered one of the few known high-mass prestellar cores, a long-sought key observable for a leading theoretical model of star formation;
(2) a Galaxy-wide census of the largest molecular filaments; he has made the first census of the densest, coldest, velocity-coherent large-scale (>10 pc) filaments in the Milky Way; and
(3) a systematic survey of dense molecular clouds in the outer Galaxy; he is principal investigator of the ESO Public Survey SAMPLING (SMT "All-sky" Mapping of PLanck Interstellar Nebulae in the Galaxy) and co-investigator of other complementary surveys, including superMALT, SEDIGISM, and SCOPE.
