Spotlight

Yi-Zhong Fan is a research professor and the director of the division of Dark Matter and Space Astronomy of Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Prof. Fan was born on April 27 1977 in Chongqing, China. In 2000 he graduated from Chang’an University and got the Bachelor degree on Survey Engineering. From September 2000 to June 2003 he studied high energy astrophysics in Nanjing University. 

He moved to Purple Mountain Observatory in September 2003 and got the PhD degree on astrophysics in March 2006. From October 2005 to November 2009 he worked in Hebrew University of Jerusalem and then Copenhagen University as a postdoctoral researcher. He visited University of Nevada, Las Vegas till March 2010. Since April 2010 he works as a member of the DAMPE team at Purple Mountain Observatory, serving as the vice director of the scientific application system of the satellite. He is in charge of the data analysis and theoretical researches of the DAMPE mission. In recent years, together with the DAMPE colleagues, Prof. Fan proposes the Very Large Area gamma-ray Space Telescope (VLAST) project, aiming at significantly advancing the dark matter and time domain astronomy studies in gamma-rays. His research interests include dark matter indirect detection, space astronomy and gravitational wave astrophysics.