Yuan-Sen Ting

Associate Investigator

Australian National University

Biography

An image that captures my background well might be one of those Russian nesting dolls: I was born near Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia (and my hometown is the beautiful riverside village in Malaysia known as Sibu), but since high school, I have continued adding to my education globally. As an undergraduate, I undertook a concurrent double degree program from the National University of Singapore, and Ecole Polytechnique, in France. Having acquired Chinese and Cantonese from my parents in Malaysia, and French from immersion courses in Singapore and France, it was only natural to practice American English that I have learned through sitcoms over the years. I moved to the United States to pursue a Ph. D. in astrophysics, enjoying some of my best years at Harvard University, funded through a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellowship. After earning my doctorate, 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). Three years and a pandemic later, I joined the Australian National University in Canberra as a permanent faculty member. 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 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, including spectroscopy (SDSS-V, DESI, GALAH, APOGEE, LAMOST, JWST), astrometry (Gaia), photometry (DES, LSST, Euclid, WFIRST) and asteroseismology (TESS, PLATO). Yuan-Sen is an Associate Professor at the Australian National University, jointly affiliated with the astronomy and computer science departments. His research endeavours revolve around the utilization of machine learning in advancing statistical inferences, specifically utilizing vast astronomical survey data. Hailing from Malaysia, Yuan-Sen was awarded a PhD in astronomy and astrophysics from Harvard University in 2017 and was subsequently granted a four-way fellowship from Princeton University, Carnegie Institute for Sciences, NASA Hubble, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. In recognition of his pioneering work in AI x Science, he was acknowledged as a Future Leader by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in addition to being honoured as a NASA Earth and Space Science Fellow. Recently, Yuan-Sen received the ARC DECRA fellowship following his induction to ANU.