2 minutes with Hao Qiu - SKAO Postdoctoral Fellow

The team based at SKAO Global HQ has continued to grow despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, and among the new starters is Postdoctoral Fellow Hao (Harry) Qiu from China. As Contact goes to print, Harry will be making his way from his current home in Australia to the UK, for a three-year role with the SKAO Science team. We managed to catch him just before he got on the plane.

Welcome to SKAO, Harry! What will you be doing as a postdoctoral fellow at SKAO?

Thanks, I’m excited to be part of the team! My project will focus on fast radio burst (FRB) science with the SKA precursor and pathfinder telescopes. I will mainly be working on the foundation studies needed to pave the way for cosmology with FRBs and radio transients in the SKA era, co-supervised by SKAO Project Scientist Dr Jeff Wagg and Dr Evan Keane, who was previously a Project Scientist at SKAO. My PhD was on searching for FRBs with the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP).

You were a co-author on a recent paper that won the AAAS Newcomb Cleveland Prize, congratulations! Tell us about that work.

I was part of the Commensal Real-time ASKAP Fast Transients (CRAFT) project aimed at localising FRBs to their host galaxy with observation data from the initial detection. Our work “A single fast radio burst localized to a massive galaxy at cosmological distance” was published in Science in 2019. This is the world’s first localisation of a non-repeating FRB, and it’s a major technical achievement by astronomers and engineers based all over the world, led by Australian research institutes. This observation technique has brought a further 10 localisations on single-appearance FRBs, and these new detections have greatly improved our understanding of the host environment of FRBs.

So far you’ve been working remotely from Australia − what has that been like as a new starter?

The time difference is certainly a challenge. Most meetings are luckily in the morning UK-time so I can still catch up, but it’s still quite late! So I look forward to being more involved after I arrive in Manchester. On the research side it is slightly easier, as I’ve been working with our collaborators at CSIRO Astronomy and Space Sciences (CASS) in Australia. The SKA is so international that I am getting used to working across different time zones!

What do you hope to take from your experience with SKAO?

The SKA is the next generation radio telescope that will expand our view of the Universe with unprecedented sensitivity. I feel it’s a great honour and opportunity for me to join the Science team and witness the development of the SKA, and I hope that I can contribute too.