Yao-Yuan Mao
They/He
I am gay and I am an astrophysicist.//
I am an Assistant Professor of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Utah. I study how galaxies form and evolve in the Universe and how they connect to the underlying dark matter structures, with the help of astronomical surveys and numerical simulations. In addition to studying astrophysics and cosmology, I am also an avid programmer and a web developer. I received my PhD in Physics from Stanford University in 2016, and then conducted postdoctoral research at the University of Pittsburgh as a Langley PITT PACC Fellow (2016-19), and later at Rutgers University as a NASA Einstein Fellow (2019-22). In 2018 I helped revamp the Astronomy and Astrophysics Outlist (astro-outlist.github.io), and have been maintaining the Astro Outlist since then. I was born and raised in Taipei, Taiwan, and I am proud that my home country became the first country in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage in 2019.