Henry Lin (astronomer)
American astrophysicist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Henry Wanjune Lin (born 1995) is an American astrophysicist and assistant professor of physics at Princeton University.[1] As a senior in high school, Lin won the Intel Young Scientist award, the second-highest award at the 2013 Intel Science and Engineering Fair, for his work with MIT professor Michael McDonald on simulations of galaxy clusters.[2] In 2015, he was named one of Forbes' 30 under 30 scientists.[3]
Henry Lin | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1995 (age 30–31) Shreveport, Louisiana, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Harvard University, Princeton University |
| Scientific career | |
| Thesis | Towards the Black Hole Interior (2022) |
| Doctoral advisor | Juan Maldacena |
Lin is a 2012 alumnus of the Research Science Institute and a 2013 alumnus of the International Summer School for Young Physicists (ISSYP) at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. In November 2013, he gave a TED talk on clusters of galaxies in New Orleans, Louisiana.[4]
Together with Harvard astronomy chair Abraham Loeb and atmospheric scientist Gonzalo Gonzalez Abad, Lin proposed a novel way to search for extraterrestrial intelligence by targeting exoplanets with industrial pollution.[5][6][7] Lin's work also includes proposing a statistical theory of human population[8] which explains Zipf's law and proposing a novel test for panspermia in the galaxy.[9]
Lin is currently a professor at Princeton University,[10] after having completed his postdoctoral training at Stanford University[11] and receiving his PhD at Princeton University under Juan Maldacena. His dissertation focused on understanding the interior of black holes in quantum gravity.[12]
