Prof. Dr. Sherry Suyu

Academic Career and Research Areas

Professor Suyu is measuring the expansion rate of our Universe, probing the nature of dark energy, studying the formation/evolution of galaxies and their dark matter halos, and observing supernovae through gravitational lensing. She is the principal investigator of the H0LiCOW program (H0 Lenses in COSMOGRAIL’s Wellspring) to measure the distances to a pilot sample of five gravitational lenses with excellent ancillary data. This program will not only provide independent and competitive cosmological constraints, but will also allow detailed investigations of the interplay between baryonic and dark matter, and the co-evolution of the nuclear supermassive black hole and its host galaxy. She is also leading an ERC funded project to study cosmology and supernovae progenitors with strongly lensed supernovae.

Professor Suyu completed her PhD in 2008 at the California Institute of Technology, and went to the University of Bonn to work as a postdoctoral research fellow. She returned to California in 2010 to work at the University of California, Santa Barbara and Stanford University as a postdoctoral scholar for two years. She then started a faculty position in 2013 at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Since 2016, Professor Suyu is a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics and an Assistant Professor at TUM, as part of the Max Planck@TUM program.

Awards

• Emmy Noether Visiting Fellowship, Perimeter Institute, Canada (2018)
• European Research Council Consolidator Grant, Europe (2017)
• Max Planck Research Group, Germany (2016)
• Significant Research Achievements of Academia Sinica (2013)