Professor GU, Meng

Current Research

Prof. Gu's research addresses several unresolved questions in the field: What is the stellar initial mass function of galaxies, how does it vary globally and locally, and what is the implications on the mass measurement? She also explores the role of environmental factors in shaping galaxy formation and evolution. How do massive galaxies grow, and what can we learn from the spatial information of stellar populations? She has used observations from the Magellan Telescopes, ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), and the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys to tackle these questions. Moving forward, she will further her research using the next-generation observing facilities, such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Subaru Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) survey.

Research Interest

• Galaxy Formation and Evolution

• Stellar Population and the Initial Mass Function

• Low Surface Brightness Observations of Galaxies

• Environmental Impact on Galaxy Evolution

Representative Publications

• "The MASSIVE SURVEY XX: The MASSIVE survey XIX. Molecular gas mea- surements of the supermassive black hole masses in the elliptical galaxies NGC 1684 and NGC 0997", Pandora Dominiak, Martin Bureau, Timothy A. Davis, Chung-Pei Ma, Jenny E. Greene, Meng Gu, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, stae314 (2024)
• "The MASSIVE SURVEY XVI. The Stellar Initial Mass Function in the Center of MASSIVE Early-Type Galaxies", Meng Gu, Jenny Greene, Andrew B. Newman, Christina Kreisch, Matthew Quenneville, Chung-Pei Ma and John P. Blakeslee, The Astrophysical Journal,932(2), 103 (2022)
• "The Stability of Fiber Spectrographs in the Faint-source Regime", Kevin Bundy, David Law, Nick MacDonald, Kyle Westfall, T. Sivarani, Devika Divakar, Matthew Bershady, Meng Gu, Renbin Yan, Namrata Roy, Claire Poppett, Niv Drory, The Astronomical Journal, 164(3), 94 (2022)
• "Spectroscopic Constraints on the Build-up of the Intracluster Light in the Coma Cluster", Meng Gu, Charlie Conroy, David Law, Pieter van Dokkum, Renbin Yan, David Wake, Kevin Bundy, Alexa Villaume, Roberto Abraham, Allison Merritt, Jielai Zhang, Matthew Bershady, Dmitry Bizyaev, Kaike Pan, Daniel Thomas, and Anne-Marie Weijmans, The Astrophysical Journal, 894(1), 32 (2020)
• "Coordinated Assembly of Brightest Cluster Galaxies", Meng Gu, Charlie Conroy, and Gabriel Brammer, The Astrophysical Journal Letters, 862(2), L18 (2018)
• "Low Metallicities and Old Ages for Three Ultra-diffuse Galaxies in the Coma Cluster", Meng Gu, Charlie Conroy, David Law, Pieter van Dokkum, Renbin Yan, David Wake, Kevin Bundy, Allison Merritt, Roberto Abraham, Jielai Zhang, Matthew Bershady, Dmitry Bizyaev, Jonathan Brinkmann, Niv Drory, Kathleen Grabowski, Karen Masters, Kaike Pan, John Parejko, Anne-Marie Weijmans, and Kai Zhang, The Astrophysical Journal, 859(1), 37 (2018)

Fellowships

• Henry Norris Russell Fellowship (Princeton University, 2019-2022)
• NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (Harvard University, 2014-2019)
• Regent's Fellowship (UC Santa Cruz, 2013)