Curriculum Vitae

Yun-Fan Zhou 周芸帆

Ph.D. Student · Radio Astronomy · Galaxy Cosmology

Research profile. I am a jointly trained Ph.D. student at Hangzhou Dianzi University and the National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences. My current research interests are radio astronomy and galaxy cosmology, with experience in radio spectral-line data, astronomical data processing pipelines, and observational searches for faint physical signals.

Research Interests

Radio astronomy; H I observations; galaxy cosmology; low-surface- brightness and ultradiffuse galaxies; axion dark matter searches; astronomical big-data processing and visualization.

Education

2025.09 – Present Hangzhou Dianzi University · National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences — Ph.D. student, joint training program
Supervisors: Rong Li (李蓉) and Haijun Tian (田海俊), HDU; Zheng Zheng (郑征), NAOC.
2019.09 – 2022.07 University of Science and Technology of China — M.Sc. in Astrophysics
2015.07 – 2019.06 China University of Geosciences (Beijing) — B.Sc. in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics

Research and Work Experience

2022.07 – 2023.12 Zhejiang Lab — Research Assistant, Astronomical Big Data Intelligent Computing and Service Platform
Contributed to the FAST CRAFTS wide-band data-processing pipeline, including standing-wave removal, off-source background estimation, baseline removal, and pipeline testing.

CRAFTS data portal: https://hiverse.zero2x.org/wide
2021.04 – 2022.11 Axion dark matter search with MeerKAT — First-author research project
Processed and analysed MeerKAT UHF-band observations of the neutron star J0806.4−4123 to search for narrow radio signatures of axion-photon conversion and constrain axion-photon coupling.
2020.09 – 2022.10 H I search for ultradiffuse galaxies — First-author research project
Used HIPASS data from the Parkes telescope to search for neutral- hydrogen counterparts of DES low-surface-brightness and ultradiffuse galaxy candidates.

Publications

Yun-Fan Zhou, Nick Houston, Gyula I. G. Józsa, Hao Chen, Yin-Zhe Ma, Qiang Yuan, et al. Searching for axion dark matter with the MeerKAT radio telescope. Physical Review D 106, 083006 (2022). DOI
Yun-Fan Zhou, Chandreyee Sengupta, Yogesh Chandola, O. Ivy Wong, Tom C. Scott, Yin-Zhe Ma, and Hao Chen. HIPASS study of southern ultradiffuse galaxies and low surface brightness galaxies. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 516, 1781–1787 (2022). DOI

Honors and Awards

Anhui Outstanding Master’s Thesis, 2024
Second Prize, Beijing Division, CUMCM, 2017
Utility Model Patent Certificate, 2018
Second Prize, 12th Experimental Physics Skills Competition, China University of Geosciences (Beijing), 2018
Merit Student, Purple Mountain Observatory, University of Science and Technology of China, 2020–2021

Skills

Programming and data

Python, MATLAB, C/C++, SQL, Jupyter, Git, Linux, LaTeX

Astronomy software

CASA, CARTA, Aladin, spectral analysis and visualization

Scientific visualization

Matplotlib, seaborn, Plotly, reproducible research workflows

Radio astronomy

FAST, Parkes/HIPASS, MeerKAT, single-dish and interferometric data