Profile

I’m a PhD student in Baltimore in America, working towards becoming a full-time scientist. I’ve lived in lots of different places before: Russia, Vietnam, Canada and America, and briefly Sweden and the UK. I really enjoy moving and visiting other countries, and being a scientist makes it very easy!

I love drinking tea, playing board games (Mafia! I love lying to people), watching TV, and listening to music (2000s alt/emo rock, yup…) I used to be a big nerd and read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi. I even spoke a little Elvish…

Recently I’ve been trying to go vegetarian to help stop climate change, and to write a fictional story about astronomy. Both are quite challenging though 🙂

My pronouns are she/her.

All stars we see in the night sky are a part of one galaxy that we live in: the Milky Way. But The Milky Way is just one small galaxy in the Universe. To be honest, it’s quite tiny and not very special. There are more than 100 billion other galaxies in the world. They all have billions of stars, and they are all really far away!

I study these faraway galaxies. We take pictures of them with telescopes, from the ground or from space. It’s very difficult: taking a good galaxy picture is as hard for me as taking a nice picture of you, standing in your house in UK, from America! Telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope are really impressive!

Scientists looked at thousands of galaxies and found out that they can look very different. Some are like the Milky Way: big disks of stars with wide spiral arms. And some are more round, more like a cloud of stars. We think that at some point, disk galaxies change – maybe after crashing into another disk! – and
become more round.

I study how does this happen: how did galaxies form a long time ago, and how do they change from spiral disks to round galaxies. Because I can’t just watch one galaxy change (it takes billions of years, and I’m not that old!), I look at many galaxies at once instead. I also get to make nice pictures of new galaxies using telescopes!

Most of my work is just sitting in front of a computer and doing this with some computer code, but sometimes I get to go to faraway places to use the telescopes. For example, I was going to go to the driest place on Earth in Chile this May! 🙂 Unfortunately, they don’t let me out in space…

Sometimes (rarely) I wake up at 9 am. Sometimes – but also rarely – at 2 pm.

I use a computer programming language called Python to look at pictures of galaxies. It’s similar to using Paint or Photoshop, but more scientific. It’s a bit different from working on photos, because I’m not trying to change the pictures or make them better. Instead, I try to study them.

Often I look at galaxy shapes: do they have spirals? Is it just one galaxy or two? Does it look like something crashed into it?

It’s sort of like if my job was to look at pictures of my friends on Facebook, and figure out: who is who? Where are their arms? What’s their eye color?

This tells me about the story of the galaxy: how did it form, and how is it changing at the moment.

A lot of my work day is talking to other scientists, as well. We get coffee, go to talks, chat in each other’s offices, and just hang out together! We sometimes talk about science, and sometimes about our favorite food 🙂 I have one officemate, who studies asteroids. It’s super cool!