Xiaohui Fan

An observational astrophysicist, Xiaohui Fan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Arizona and an Associate Astronomer at the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona.  Particularly interested in extragalactic astronomy and cosmology, he studies the farthest galaxies and quasars to better understand the origins of black holes and the earliest days of the universe.  During his Guggenheim Fellowship term, Xiaohui Fan will be working at the Max Planck Institute for Astonomy in Heidelberg, Germany, using the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), which is the most powerful telescope in the world, to further his researches on quasars beyond the Redshift Seven Barrier.

Born in Beijing, China, Mr. Fan received his B.S. from Nanjing University in 1992, and an M.S. in 1995 from the Beijing Astronomical Observatory. After receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2000, he spent the next two years as the Frank and Piggy Taplan Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Beginning with his graduate work at Princeton, he has been deeply involved with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a project to obtain a three-dimensonal digital map of about one-fourth of the sky.

His many honors include an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship (2003-06), a David and Lucile Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering (2004-09); a New Lacy Pierce Prixe from the American Astronomical Sociey in 2003 for the discovery of distant quasars; and grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Sloan and Packard foundations totaling over $1.5 million.  In 2004, he was named one of the "Brilliant Ten" young scientists by Popular Science.