What is your position or role in the DESI project?
I am currently a co-convener of the DESI Year 1 BAO Key Project.
Where were you born?
Busan, South Korea
Where do you live now?
I live in Athens, Ohio, a small college town. This year, though, I am living in Berkeley, California, for my sabbatical leave. I am super excited.
What do you do as part of DESI?
My postdocs, students, and I are members of the galaxy—quasar clustering working group and our focus is on how to better reconstruct the cosmological information in the distribution of the galaxies, part of which has been lost during the evolution of the Universe for the last 13.8 billion years. We are also working on how to best clean up the observational systematics from the data using a deep learning method.
As a co-convener of the Year 1 BAO Key project (aka Key Project 4), I and many KP4 participants together are working on robustly deriving the DESI Year 1 BAO measurement. We expect the first year DESI data alone to produce the best BAO measurement to date, and therefore it requires a much more stringent systematic control than has been ever done.
What is the most interesting or exciting thing about your job?
What can be more exciting than learning about our Universe? 🙂
Any advice for an aspiring scientist?
Do what you like the most (but I am 99.99% sure that whoever reading this already like astrophysics very much). And the postdoc time is the best time (so, keep swimming).
What do you do for fun?
Learning new things such as piano, kick-boxing, and ballet.
If you weren’t a scientist, what would be your dream job?
This job was my dream job. My alternative dream job was a cartoonist (I had good talent on this, except that I could not redraw the same character more than once).
What excites/interests you most about DESI?
This is the best galaxy survey data today and also I very much appreciate and enjoy the collaborative environment of DESI. Working with people across the world to solve a common question brings you some exciting moments from time to time.
