Online Presence
I spend most of my time thinking about how living systems organize themselves, how motion, form, and function fold into dynamic loops that make biological physics ever so slightly more magical than partial differential equations in a book. My current focus is on cilia, the micrometer-scale, hair-like cellular appendages that line our airways, reproductive tracts, and even brain ventricles. Amazingly, not only is each cilium powered by thousands of dynein motors, but millions of copies of cilia can also coordinate to fulfill macroscopic flow functions crucial to many ways of life -- from single-cell protists to algae colonies, larvae and embryos, wide variety of animals, and us human beings. These filamentous structures are also great inspirations for artificial micro-manipulators.
My broader goal is to understand how local interactions produce effective group laws, how the collective dynamics pushes meso/macro-scale physics back onto the active constituent units, and the causal emergence of coordination. I approach this through the lens of coarse-grained modeling, mechanical instabilities, multi-stabilities, and reinforcement learning techniques. As I gradually expanded from theory into microscopy and some wet lab experiments, I hope one day I will fulfill my own academic "hierarchical cycle" (but seriously) and build a consistent understanding of living active matter.
Outside the lab, I like to make quirky music (isn't this thing amazing) while enjoying the classics, slow-mo everything (humming bird on phantom) and photograph with maximum unseriousness (contrary to these beauties), jam body parts into cracks (I'm talking about bouldering, yo), and think about geometry and topology, computer graphics, space related stuff (yes, I built rockets that flew too close to the crowd before) and sustainability technologies. I am especially drawn to see how similar ideas of emergent structures and constraints shape the complexity of our everyday world.
I will be joining the physics department of Nankai University in 2026 to work with Prof. Leiting Pan. My postdoc supervisor is Dr. Janna Nawroth at Helmholtz Pioneer Campus in Munich, Germany. I completed my fluid mechanics PhD (on modeling cilia) following Prof. Eva Kanso at USC. I studied both pure mathematics and astronautical engineering at UT Austin, where I also worked as a student research assistant at Center for Space Research.
click here for random babbles before 2017 with new edits in \[.*\]
Background photo
The cutie on the right is[was] my adopted sister 多多, who is still living[sadly passed away with loved ones caring till the end in 2024] at my hometown,
the breathtakingly magnificent
黄山.
Reading
Among my favourite books are the Princeton Companion to Mathematics, Counterexamples in Topology, the Variational Principles of Mechanics, many more Dover (re)publications and other classics, such as things listed here and at the end of May's A Concise Course in Algebraic Topology. Just go buy (me) something from my (old) Amazon wishlist :P
And behold another set of gems of mathematical exposition.
Maths aside, I find the Road to Serfdom[not that I agreed with the thesis at the time of writing. The double standard there is rather astounishing.
This, among others, is much more insightful for life.], Crosby's Ecological Imperialism, and
the Massacre at El Mozote to be good reads. I also love lots of Chinese classics from 说文解字, an ancient treatise documenting
Chinese Etymology and things like 论语, to 金庸的武侠, famous 20th century martial art fantasies...
And I am in the process of digesting some works of 林语堂 [Yeah that never finished...].
And now an essay about programming [and don't forget the classic wat].
Music
I play the piano (was a bit out of practice) [but can you imagine I attempted to pull off playing our song at the wedding :))] and recently picked up some guitar action [yeah still can't just play more than 80% of any tune].
Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and Bach are probably my most cherished composers. I love passion in the classical scales but also value precision, dignity, and complexity. My favourite pieces from them are Rhapsodie Espagnole, Liebestraum No.3, Consolation No.3, Hungarian Rhapsodies, and Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos, Prelude op.23 No.5, and the rhapsody. (It's pretty hard to pick favorites from Bach so I'm just gonna say Violin Partita No.2 plus all the fugues and inventions.) Beethoven's Symphony No.7 2nd mov., Etudes 'Revolutionary' of Chopin, Prokofiev's Piano Concerto op.26 No.3 1st mov., Bartok's Piano Concerto No.2 3rd mov. are also on my permanent playlist. My old flatmate(s) also forever made an impression of House/Techno/EDM vibe into my musical tastes [why can't I be as cool as ARIatHOME? D':].
Other Stuff
You can also read all about my thoughts on some shows and pictures for the past few years [ah... the college years and the free time ... no haven't update that in a while] or so here. There is some amateur photography here as well.
Here's a fun way to get some intuition on 1D quantum dynamics.
If you have never heard of Oskar van Deventer, you should certainly check out his YouTube channel of puzzles.
And speaking of YouTubers, go watch something from Brady's NumberPhile and Objectivity channels and other math stuff from 3blue1brown. A full collection of my favourite YouTuber can be found here.
Tinkering, manufacturing (the engineering guy has an awesome video on injection molding), and rapid prototyping (additive mfg., laser techs, and good ol' CNC) have always fascinated me I also love open source anything, from SageMath to openSCAD [still my fav] to farming (open source ecology).
I've been occasionally using and contributing to) Forvo for awhile now [I would now invite you to join RedNote to get authentic dialects of all kinds from the source].
This Google calendar hours calculator comes in handy at times. So has this scheduling tool if you are a fellow Google calendar junkie like me.
I have also been learning French and German (mostly) through Duolingo for some time now. [And the skills just go downhill the longer my streak goes Ahhhhhha!] ielanguages also have some pretty cool lessons (esp. on French pronunciation for me).
And why does paper warp dried after getting wet? Reddit comes to the rescue.
Ig-noble prizes! This is still my fav. What about hunger?.
Tune find, IMSDb[oh man, feel so old to be there when IMDB was an active forum.], CoInflation, and PHD stipends are some cool online databases.
Have you ever heard of the common stinkhorn?
Finally a few quotes I like.