Pak-Shing Li

Biography

1993: MSc in Astrophysics, University of Calgary

1999: PhD in Physics, University of Wyoming

1999-2002: Postdoc at National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)

2002-2003: Postdoc at Physics Department of University of California at San Diego

2004-now: Research Specialist at Astronomy Department of University of California at Berkeley

Research

My research interests include numerical code development (Li et al. 2012), ideal and non-ideal magneto-hydrodynamics (MHD) turbulent systems (Li et al. 2006, Li et al. 2008, McKee et al. 2010, Li et al. 2012), infrared dark clouds formation, star formation in filamentary dark clouds, and large data set visulazation.

My current research focus is on the comprehensive study of star formation from large magnetized turbulent molecular clouds to the formation of proto-stars and accretion disk using numerical simulations on the latest massively parallel supercomputers.  I am using our own Radiative-MHD Adaptive Mesh Refinement (AMR) code ORION2 (Li et al. 2012) for all my simulations.  With my collaborators Chris McKee and Richard Klein, we are studying the formation and the physical properties of the massive filamentary dark clouds, which are believed to be the precusors of the massive stars and star clusters.  The magnetic field properties of the dense clumps and cores inside the dark clouds using large scale AMR simulations are carefully compared with latest Zeeman observations (Li et al. 2015).  Extreme high resolution AMR simulations are being conducted to study the importance of radiation and outflow feedback from proto-stars forming inside the filamentary molecular clouds and the formation of disks around the proto-stars.