John F. Wu

John Wu is an Associate Astronomer at STScI with appointments in the Department of Physics and Astronomy and Department of Computer Science at JHU. Dr. Wu's research focuses on studying galaxies with multi-wavelength observations, machine learning, and interpretable artificial intelligence for scientific discovery. His research group has developed and employed deep learning algorithms that process astronomical imaging data at the pixel scale in order to understand how galaxy appearances are governed by their growth and evolution, and have devised graph neural networks to investigate represent galaxies and dark matter halos amidst their large-scale environments. Dr. Wu is the Applied AI Scientist in the Data Science Mission Office (DSMO). During the summer of 2024, he lead the multidisciplinary JSALT team on evaluating large language model (LLM) performance in research astronomy. Previously, he was in the Roman Telescope Branch of the Instruments Division, and served as the technical lead of the Roma Data Monitoring Tool. In 2024, Dr. Wu was named the Maryland Outstanding Young Scientist. Dr. Wu began his tenure-track Assistant Astronomer position at STScI in 2022. He first joined STScI as a postdoc (2020), prior to which he was a postdoc at JHU (2019). He previously earned his PhD in Physics and Astronomy at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (2019) and BSc in Physics/Astrophysics at Carnegie Mellon University (2013).

Education:

PhD in Physics and Astronomy Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
BSc in Physics and Astrophysics, Carnegie Mellon University

Science Interests and Research:

• Galaxy Formation and Evolution
• Interstellar and Circumgalactic Medium
• Machine Learning and Statistical Methods

Professional Websites:

Professional Website

Blog

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5077-881X