Professor Shude Mao

Dr. Shude Mao is a professor of astrophysics at the National Astronomical Observatories of China and University of Manchester, UK. He obtained his PhD from Princeton University in 1992. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics. He joined the University of Manchester as a faculty member at the end of 1999. He won the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award from the Humbolt Foundation in 2007.

His current research interests are gravitational lensing, galactic dynamics and galaxy formation. He proposed gravitational microlensing as a way to detect extrasolar planets in the Milky Way and showed that strong gravitational lenses can be used to probe substructures and supermassive black holes in galaxies. He co-developed a model for the formation and evolution of disk galaxies.

web site: www.jb.man.ac.uk/~smao