The High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) Observatory, located in central Mexico at 4100 m above sea level, is sensitive to gamma rays from a few hundreds GeV to above 100 TeV. HAWC has an instantaneous field of view of 2 steradians and continuously observes two-third of the sky each day. HAWC performs unbiased sky survey of the TeV gamma-ray sources in the northern hemisphere. There are variety of science topics we can study with HAWC. One of the most important topics is targeting the century-old puzzle of the origin of cosmic rays. The continuous time coverage and wide field of view also makes HAWC critical in the era of multi-wavelength and multi-messenger astronomy. I will present recent highlights from the HAWC observatory.

Dr. Zhou's background is in particle astrophysics. He is interested in the study of TeV gamma rays to solve the century-old puzzle of the origin of cosmic rays. Dr. Zhou earned his bachelor degree from Harbin Institute of Technology and his Ph.D. degree from Michigan Technological University. Since 2016, he has been a postdoctoral research associate at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Dr. Zhou is a member of the High Altitude Water Cherenkov (HAWC) collaboration since 2010, and he is currently the Galactic science coordinator of HAWC. He carries out work on calibration, event reconstruction, and the likelihood analysis of the Galactic TeV gamma ray sources for the HAWC collaboration.