Zheng Zhang
Astrophysicist · Cosmologist

Listening to the cosmos, reading its light.

I develop methods and theories that connect radio observations, weak gravitational lensing, and the evolving structures of the Universe.

Zheng Zhang
Zheng ZhangPostdoctoral Researcher · University of Manchester

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Portrait of Zheng Zhang
01 · Who I am

About me

I am Zheng Zhang, a Postdoctoral Researcher in Cosmology at the University of Manchester, based at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics.

My work spans theory and methods for extracting science from observations—turning questions about the Universe into predictions we can calculate, instruments we can build, and signals we can measure.

Now
Manchester · Jodrell Bank
Journey
Shanghai · Providence · Paris · Manchester
My journey, mentors, and students →
02 · The hydrogen Universe

Radio Cosmology

Neutral hydrogen fills the Universe, and its 21-cm line lets us watch cosmic history unfold — from the first stars to the large-scale structure of today. I pursue 21-cm cosmology in two complementary ways: intensity mapping, which charts cosmic structure over enormous volumes without resolving individual galaxies, and global-signal measurements with RHINO, an experiment I help build to capture the sky-averaged 21-cm spectrum.

  1. RHINO: a global 21-cm signal experiment
  2. Rheplicant: an auto-differentiable digital twin for radio telescopes
  3. Joint Bayesian calibration and map-making
  4. Mapping the anisotropic radio sky
Rendering of the RHINO pyramidal horn antenna with dimensions: a 7.3 by 6 metre aperture flare section atop a rectangular waveguide
The RHINO horn antenna — a 7.3 × 6 m aperture pointed at the zenith (Bull et al., Fig. 1).
Simulated convergence structure on a cosmological lightcone
03 · From geodesics to statistics

Weak Gravitational Lensing

I formulate weak lensing as a stochastic field theory, deriving observable n-point statistics from null-geodesic dynamics and cosmic structure.

  1. Statistical Field Theory for Weak Gravitational Lensing
  2. sft-wick formalism and package
  3. Conference slides · Aegina 2026
04 · Modelling, evolution, representation

Modelling Structure Across Scales

From spinning interstellar nanograins to the large-scale cosmic web, I build physical models of how structures form and evolve — and emulators that represent their statistics cheaply enough for large-scale inference.

05 · Open source

Pinned research software

The repositories selected on my GitHub profile.

01
RHINO-Experiment/rheplicant

A differentiable replica of a radio antenna — the same JAX model that simulates an observation calibrates it.

02
StatFieldTheory/sft-wick

An open-source Python package that constructs diagram tables and computes their integrals numerically for stochastic field dynamics cast into a path-integral formulation.

03
zzhang0123/limTOD

limTOD is a Python package for simulating Time-Ordered Data (TOD) from single-dish/autocorrelation observations.

04
zzhang0123/MomentEmu

A lightweight, interpretable polynomial emulator for smooth mappings, implemented in pure Python.

05
zzhang0123/MomentRFI

Iterative two-phase sigma-clipping for flagging Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) in radio cosmology waterfall data, using 2D polynomial surface fitting powered by [MomentEmu](https://github.com/zzhang0123/MomentEmu).

06
SpyDust/SpyDust

An improved implementation of SPDust for modeling spinning dust radiation

06 · Beyond the research map

Life beyond the equations.

Research is only part of the story. I also write about travel, academic life, and the ideas and events that stay with me beyond a paper or a line of code.

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