Cuncheng (Mandy) Chen

Mandy Chen’s research focuses on robustly characterizing the dynamics of the circumgalactic medium—the outermost, gaseous envelope of galaxies. This expansive gas reservoir dominates the baryonic mass of a galaxy, and records critical information about a galaxy’s past and ongoing interactions with the surrounding environment. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, Chen leveraged the recent advent of high-throughput integral field spectrographs and built the first spatially-resolved constraints on galactic outflows and CGM turbulence in distant galaxies. Using several different strong emission lines as tracers, she initiated and led investigations of gaseous halos surrounding galaxies with and without strong black hole accretion. As a Carnegie-Caltech Brinson Postdoctoral Fellow in Observational Cosmology, Chen harnesses data from ground-based integral field spectrographs on both Keck and Magellan combined with the burgeoning wealth of archival data from JWST/NIRSpec IFU to decode the complexities of turbulent motions in the circumgalactic medium across a wide range of physical scales and cosmic epochs.