About Me

Welcome to my website. I am a KIPAC Post-doctoral Fellow in Astrophysics at Stanford. I am best known for combining trillion-particle simulations, bayesian inference, and generative ML models to probe the physics of galaxy-dark matter connection and to constrain fundamental models of the Universe. More recently I have been working on applications of cutting-edge DL/GenAI techniques to science, including LLM-based idea generation, physics foundation models, and simulation-based inference.

I have also been a member of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration, where I led the simulation working group for two consecutive terms. We recently released our Year 1 results. It caused a bit of a splash ;) (Article)

I am currently working with Prof. Risa Wechsler. I completed my PhD in Astrophysics with Prof. Daniel Eisenstein at Harvard in 2021. Before that, I got my Bachelors degree in Astrophysics at Princeton, where I worked on various exciting projects such as identifying obscured quasars in SDSS, looking for ultra diffuse galaxies in HSC, and simulating progenitor gas clouds in the early Universe.

I have a fair amount of experience in public speaking/communication. I won $2000 in the SLAC research SLAM. I also gave a public lecture on dark energy. (Video)

I have been widely involved in teaching and outreach. At Harvard, I was a teaching assistant for ASTRO 17 and ASTRO 130. I was a founding member of Open Labs At Harvard, with the goal of promoting science and research education among underpriviledged K-12 students in the Greater Boston area. Aside from work, I enjoy tennis, DJing, and cooking.

My Chinese name is 袁思涵, listen here for the correct pronunciation: Google Pronounce . But you can also just call me Sandy.