Yun Zhang

Yun Zhang is a planetary scientist working at Lagrange Laboratory, Côte d’Azur Observatory (France). Her research interests include the theoretical analysis and numerical modeling of small planetary bodies (asteroids, comets, and trans-neptunian objects). She received her PhD from Tsinghua University at 2018, with the honor of Outstanding Graduates of Beijing. Her thesis, entitled “Rotational and collisional evolution mechanisms of rubble-pile asteroids”, won the Outstanding Thesis Award, for the best PhD thesis of Tsinghua University.
After graduation, she went to Singapore to accompany her husband and used supercomputers to study traffic flow in Nanyang Technological University as a postdoctoral researcher. She continuously worked on planetary science in her spare time. In 2019 summer, she decided to come back to the planetary science area, where her enthusiasm stays at.
She currently dedicates to studying tidal, rotational and collisional evolution mechanisms of small bodies in general. Her work has revealed the possible internal structure, mechanical properties, and formation mechanism of several small bodies and the interstellar object 1I/’Oumuamua. She is working as a core member of NASA DART and ESA Hera mission science team to characterize the properties of the target asteroid Didymos.