Chris Le Wang

Chris Le Wang

Senior Undergraduate Student

Computer Science, Physics, and Applied Mathematics & Statistics

Department of Physics & Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University

Biography

My name is Chris “Le” Wang (王乐). I am a senior undergraduate student at Johns Hopkins University triple majoring in computer science, physics (with emphasis on astrophysics), and applied mathematics & statistics. My research focus is exoplanets, specifically their formation and atmospheres. I am especially interested in how planets like the Earth came into being, and whether there exists similar worlds like ours in the universe. I use both numerical simulations to study the theoretical outcomes of planet formation and a combination of space-based and ground-based observations to characterize exoplanets.

At Hopkins, I work with Prof. Kevin Schlaufman and Dr. Matthew Clement on theories of planet formation. I also work with Prof. David Sing and Zafar Rustamkulov on exoplanet atmospheres with JWST and a variety of ground-based observatories.

Interests
  • Planet Formation
  • Exoplanet Atmosphere
  • Data Mining in Astronomy
  • Galactic Archeology
  • Data Science/Machine Learning
  • Software Engineering
Education
  • BSc in Computer Science, Physics, and Applied Mathematics & Statistics (GPA 3.95/4.0), 2025

    Johns Hopkins University

  • Cambridge AICE & Chinese High School Diploma (GPA 4.0/4.0), 2021

    Hangzhou Foreign Languages School


Recent News

May 12, 2024My junior year is officially over! Time flies.... I am back in China for about two months, you may see my emails at weird hours 😈
April 30, 2024My project on computational study of accretion modes of planet formation was awarded the 2024 IDIES Summer Student Fellowship!
April 26, 2024I presented my research on data reduction pipeline for JWST NIRISS SOSS at Physics Departmental Poster Showcase.
April 17, 2024I presented my research on 1. relation between planet formation and stellar elemental abundance and 2. WASP-96b atmospheres with JWST at DREAMS symposium 2024.

Publications

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(2021). Test of Bell’s and Mermin’s inequalities on Quantum Computer. ITCA.

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(2021). General Relativity Testing in Exoplanetary Systems. IOP Conf. Ser.: Earth Environ. Sci. 658 012051.

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Academic Experience

 
 
 
 
 
David Sing's Exoplanet Group
Undergraduate Researcher (BDP Fellow)
June 2022 – Present Baltimore, MD

Area of expertise: exoplanet atmosphere and observational astronomy.

  • Incorporated nested sampling and MCMC with gaussian prior to FIREFLy (group’s JWST reduction pipeline).
  • Developed FIREFLy to be capable of JWST NIRISS-SOSS data.
  • Extracted transmission spectra for HAT-P-14b (Liu & Wang et al., in prep), WASP-96b (Wang et al., in prep), and K2-18b (Schmidt et al., in prep) with JWST NIRISS SOSS. Performed atmospheric retrieval jointly with data from various other observatories, e.g. VLT, HST, Spitzer, JWST-NIRSpec.
 
 
 
 
 
Kevin Schlaufman's Exoplanet Group
Undergraduate Researcher (2023 Summer PURA Fellow, 2023-24 AY Dean’s ASPIRE Fellow, 2024 Summer IDIES Summer Student Fellow)
January 2022 – Present Baltimore, MD

Area of expertise: planet formation, computational astrophysics, stellar structures, and data science.

  • Assembled photometry for every star confirmed as an open cluster member by Gaia. Developed algorithms that fit HR-diagrams and reject unresolved binary stars.
  • Studied elemental abundances of exoplanet hosting stars. Combining stellar evolution simulations (MESA), we showed there is no relationship between stellar photospheric elemental abundance pattern and planet formation (Wang & Schlaufman, in prep.).
  • investigate the relative importance between pebble accretion and planetesimal accretion to the outcomes of planet formation directly with numerical simulations and exoplanet demographics.

Side Projects

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Astrophotography

Astrophotography

Photos of the astronomical objects I took with various observatories. I do post-processing in Python, Siril, and Adobe Lightroom.

Apache Point Observatory Reduction and Calibration TOol S (ARCTOS)

Apache Point Observatory Reduction and Calibration TOol S (ARCTOS)

A custom data reduction pipeline built for data from the Apache Point Observatory (under development).

EZnote

EZnote

Automatic note-taking tool. Won the overall second place and the Most Useful Application to Help with Learning awards at Hophacks 2022.

Contact