Henry Lin | |
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Born | 1995 (age 29–30) Shreveport, Louisiana, U.S. |
Alma mater | Harvard University, Princeton University |
Scientific career | |
Thesis | Towards the Black Hole Interior (2022) |
Doctoral advisor | Juan Maldacena |
Henry Wanjune Lin (born 1995) is an American astrophysicist and incoming assistant professor of physics at Princeton University. [1] As a senior in high school, Lin won the Intel Young Scientist award, the second-highest award at the 2013 Intel Science and Engineering Fair, for his work with MIT professor Michael McDonald on simulations of galaxy clusters. [2] In 2015, he was named one of Forbes' 30 under 30 scientists. [3]
Lin is a 2012 alumnus of the Research Science Institute and a 2013 alumnus of the International Summer School for Young Physicists (ISSYP) at Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. In November 2013, he gave a TED talk on clusters of galaxies in New Orleans, LA. [4]
Together with Harvard astronomy chair Abraham Loeb and atmospheric scientist Gonzalo Gonzalez Abad, Lin proposed a novel way to search for extraterrestrial intelligence by targeting exoplanets with industrial pollution. [5] [6] [7] Lin's unconventional work also includes proposing a statistical theory of human population [8] which explains Zipf's Law and proposing a novel test for panspermia in the galaxy. [9]
He is currently a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University [10] after receiving his PhD at Princeton University under Juan Maldacena. His dissertation focused on understanding the interior of black holes in quantum gravity. [11]