Chi-Kwan "CK" Chan

Chi-Kwan "CK" Chan

Associate Astronomer, Steward Observatory
Image
CK Chan

N332

Pronouns:
he, him, his

Dr. Chi-kwan "CK" Chan is an Associate Astronomer and Research Professor at Steward Observatory and the Department of Astronomy, University of Arizona (UArizona). He served as the Secretary of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration Science Council from 2020 to 2022. He recently led the publication of the computational and theoretical modeling/interpretation of our black hole, Sgr A*. Dr. Chan created the collaboration's computational and data processing infrastructures and continues to manage them to this day, along with leading both the Software and Data Compatibility and the Gravitational Physics Working Groups in the collaboration. He is a faculty member and a steering committee member of the Theoretical Astrophysics Program (TAP), a co-lead of TAP Computation and Data Intuitive (CDI), a faculty member of the Applied Mathematics Program and Data Science Institute, and serves as the vice-chair of UArizona Research Computing Governance Committee (RCGC). In addition to pioneering the use of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) to accelerate the modeling of black holes, Dr. Chan also developed many new algorithms to improve and accelerate modern astrophysics research, built cloud computing infrastructures for large observational data, and applied machine learning algorithms to speed up and automate data processing. Dr. Chan has taught and mentored in subjects of machine learning, numerical analysis, cloud computing, and quantum computing; biked across the U.S.; and is an avid hiker.

Research Areas
Computation Astrophysics
Extreme Astrophysics
Quasars & Active Galactic Nuclei
Facilities
Event Horizon Telescope
Research Groups
Steward Theory, Data and Computation Group