Group · Ting Li

Group news

Recent news

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Sep 2026

Tri Nguyen joins the group as an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellow. Welcome, Tri!

Aug 2026

Mairead Heiger successfully defended her PhD thesis and moves to the University of Virginia as a GECO/CosmicAI Prize Fellow. Congratulations, Dr. Heiger!

Aug 2026

Emma Jiayi Xu successfully defended her MSc thesis. Congratulations, Emma!

Aug 2026

Gustavo Medina leaves for the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in Groningen on an NWO Veni Fellowship. Congratulations, Gustavo – we will miss you!

Aug 2026

Nathan Sandford leaves for UC Santa Cruz on an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship. Congratulations, Nathan – we will miss you!

Aug 2026

Our SUDS scholars presented their summer projects at the SUDS poster showcase. Well done!

Aug 2026

Our SURP and Mitacs Globalink students presented posters at the SURP poster fair. Excellent showcases, all of you!

Jul 2026

Nasser Mohammed passed his thesis qualifier exam and is now officially a PhD candidate. Congratulations, Nasser!

Jul 2026

Mairead Heiger is a recipient of the 2026 Fieldus Award for research and service to the department. Congratulations, Mairead!

Jul 2026

The Fields Institute workshop Near Field Cosmology in the Era of Big Data: Local Group and Beyond, which I organized, brought together 164 participants from 18 countries, 90 of them in person. Talk recordings are available on the workshop page.

Jul 2026

Emma Jiayi Xu, Zain Azam, and Daksh Singh presented posters at SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation in Copenhagen – their first international conference. Congratulations!

Jun 2026

Diego Martínez Noriega (University of Waterloo) and Isabelle Laing won a CASCA 2026 Best Oral Presentation award for their joint talk DOROTHY: Stellar Catalogue for 13 Million Milky Way Stars Derived Using a Machine Learning Pipeline. A wonderful accomplishment by undergraduate students!

Jun 2026

Alexandros Pratsos presented a poster on characterizing stellar streams with error-aware machine learning, supervised by Biprateep Dey, at the Conference on Physics and AI (PAI26) at Stanford – his first international conference.

Jun 2026

Welcome to our Mitacs Globalink interns Laly Boyer (Université Grenoble Alpes), Emily Moran (Queen's University Belfast), and Olivia Shen (University of Hong Kong), joining the group for the summer (June–August).

Jun 2026

Welcome to Nawaf Alrefaie and Yazan Bakhshwin, visiting us through the KAUST program as SUDS scholars for the summer (June–August).

May 2026

Canada joins the ANDES consortium for ESO's Extremely Large Telescope, with a $22.6M award from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and provincial partners: Canada now at the heart of the world's largest telescope. I am PI of the $3.8M Ontario Research Fund component.

May 2026

Welcome to our SURP students Frank Ziang Chen, Liwen Chen, Damon Johnston, and Matteo Moretti, joining the group for the summer (May–August).

May 2026

Welcome to Andy Yu, joining the group for the summer as a SUDS scholar (May–August).

Mar 2026

Two JWST Cycle 5 programs awarded to the group, in a cycle oversubscribed by 11 to 1: Exploring the Accretion History and Halo of Giant Elliptical Cen A with Resolved Stars (GO 10246, PI Nathan Sandford) and The Faint Frontier: Pushing Proper Motion Limits with JWST+Gaia (AR 12274, PI Kevin McKinnon). Congratulations to both!

Graduate students

Mairead Heiger

PhD student

Galactic chemical evolution & nucleosynthesis

→ U. Virginia (GECO/CosmicAI Fellow)

Emma Jarvis

PhD student

The GD-1 stream with DESI

Nasser Mohammed

PhD student

Stellar stream census & dark matter

Anika Slizewski

PhD student

Mass estimators with phase-space distribution functions

Emma Jiayi Xu

MSc student (Physics)

DMD-MOS spectrograph; GigaBIT filter selection

Undergraduate researchers (current)

Nawaf Alrefaie

Mapping dark matter with AI

Zain Azam

CMOS detector characterization for DMD-MOS

Yazan Bakhshwin

Metallicities of RR Lyrae with LSST

Laly Boyer

DMD-MOS instrumentation

Aishani Chaudhuri

Hunting for binary stars in DESI spectroscopy

Frank Ziang Chen

DMD-based multi-object spectrograph

Liwen Chen

Improving stellar astrometry with JWST & Gaia

Rosayla Coulthard

CEMP stars & ML abundance validation

Winnie (Mingzhi) Jiang

RR Lyrae in the Orphan-Chenab stellar stream

Damon Johnston

Constraining the local universe with Gaia & Hubble stellar motions

Isabelle Laing

Galactic paleontology; the DOROTHY catalogue

Andrew Li

Finding stellar streams in S5 with Bayesian mixture models

→ MSc, U. Victoria

Wesley Luo

Mapping the stellar halo with BHB stars in DELVE

Connor MacKeigan

Stream characterization with machine learning

Diego Martínez Noriega

University of Waterloo

The DOROTHY stellar catalogue with machine learning

Emily Moran

Stellar stream modelling

Matteo Moretti

The formation history of Andromeda

Alexandros Pratsos

Milky Way substructure with geometric deep learning

Olivia Shen

Dwarf galaxies and self-interacting dark matter

Daksh Singh

Automated optical fiber characterization for future spectroscopic surveys

Matteo Statti

A small-scale SCIDAR for campus telescopes

Pedro Werneck

Stellar proper motions with GaiaHub & BP3M

Maia Wertheim

Searching for streams in the distant Milky Way halo

→ U of T PhD

Andy Yu

Mapping dark matter with AI

Where they go next

Group alumni

Former group members have gone on to graduate programs at leading institutions. Below are undergraduate mentees who published with the group; a full list of mentees and their publications is in my CV.