Rate My Professor Zheng Cai

Zheng Cai is an Associate Professor and Vice Chair of the Department of Astronomy at Tsinghua University. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Science and Technology of China and his Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Arizona in 2015. From 2015 to 2019, he held a NASA Hubble Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of California, Santa Cruz, before joining Tsinghua University in 2019. In addition to his faculty role, he serves as Deputy Chair of the Department of Astronomy and Director of the Deep Space Technology Center at Tsinghua University. His research focuses on observational cosmology, with particular emphasis on high-redshift galaxies, quasars (QSOs), the intergalactic medium, and large-scale structures in the early Universe. He develops techniques to identify massive structures at high redshift to constrain cosmology and galaxy formation models, leads efforts to assemble the largest samples of Lyman alpha nebulae to map cosmic filaments at z approximately 2, and investigates early metal enrichment of the intergalactic medium at z=4–6, Population III stars in galaxies at z=7, and quasar host galaxies at z=2–3. Cai has received the NASA Hubble Fellowship, the Xplore Prize, and an excellent teacher award. He is the principal investigator of the MUST project and maintains an active research program in astrophysics and instrumentation.