About me

I am currently a a DAWN fellow at the Cosmic Dawn Center, working at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU Space). My research interest is studying galaxy formation and evolution across cosmic time and space.

I received funding as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) postdoctoral fellow at the same institution between 2023-2025. Before coming to Denmark in 2021, I was a postdoctoral fellow in the IR group at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Munich. Prior to this, I spent several months at Nagoya University, as a research staff appointed by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) after I received my Ph.D. degree from the University of Tokyo in 2018.

I was born in South Korea but a large chunk of my life has been spent abroad in Japan and European countries (Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark). When I am off the grid from the astronomical coordinates, I enjoy reading books (mostly essays and non-fiction), doing yoga and pilates, going to galleries (I love the 18th- and 19th-century arts), listening to music (of a variety of genres) or playing piano, as well as doing outreach activities.

Research highlight

  • Gas content

    I study the cold gas content of galaxies mainly using CO, [CI], and dust to understand how present-day red-and-dead massive galaxies emerged, formed stars, and ceased their activity.

    [Latest result]: A new publication on the high dust content in a quiescent galaxy candidate at z~2 (Lee et al. 2024a, MNRAS)

    Relevant work (first authored): Gas content with CO and dust in z=2.5 protocluster galaxies (Lee et al. 2017, ApJ). A follow-up study of gas content with [CI] calibration at z=2.5 (Lee et al. 2021a, ApJ). To better understand the connection to galaxy quenching, I also studied the gas kinematics of two star-forming galaxies in the same protocluster and the kinematic structure of the protocluster (Lee et al. 2019a, ApJ).

  • Properties of interstellar medium

    At far-infrared wavelength, fine-structure lines (e.g., [CII], [OIII], [OI], [NII]) trace ionized gas around newly formed stars and neutral region in the outer part being more robust against dust obscuration compared to shorter wavelengths. They allow us to infer the physical properties of interstellar medium, like density, temperature, and ionization parameters

    Relevant work (first authored): In Lee et al. 2021b and Lee et al. 2019b, I present-ed two case studies to demonstrate how fainter lines of [NII] and [OI] are useful in understanding galaxy evolution beyond z=4 when the universe was less than 1.5 Gyrs old.

  • Galaxy evolution

    I am part of international collaborations to study galaxy evolution in multiple aspects. Current active involvement includes the ERIS/VLT GTO program to survey distant galaxies at z~1-3 galaxies using optical/near-infrared wavelengths, NOEMA3D (MPG-IRAM Observatory Programs), AS2COSPEC (ALMA Spectroscopic Survey of the Brightest Submillimeter Galaxies), ALCS (ALMA Lensing Cluster Survey) and RAGERS (The RAdio Galaxy Environment Reference Survey). I also serve as a coordinator of the science design study (WP6/Distant universe and Cosmology) for a next-generation large aperture (50-m class) single dish submm telescope (AtLAST: Atacama Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope). A white paper on the perspective of probing cold circumgalactic medium as part of the AtLAST science design study is available here (Lee et al. 2024b).
    A full publication list is available in this link to the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS).


Current Project

ECOGAL
ECOology for Galaxies using ALMA archive and Legacy surveys

The current project is to study how galaxies differently form stars now and then
by constraining (mainly) gas, the ingredient of making stars, assisted by multi-wavelength data sets in the archive.

The first data release (catalogue ver1.0) is now available with a data paper (Lee et al. 2025 [arXiv:2511.20751]) detailing the analysis.
Data products are accessible via The DAWN JWST archive (DJA) and Zenodo.
A demo post for querying and exploration is available here.

  • 220 ALMA project
  • 1842 Unique Images
  • 128,125 Galaxies