Galaxy formation is an essential research area in astronomy. In recent years, high-resolution cosmological zoom-in simulations with realistic multi-phase ISM, star formation, and feedback models have significantly advanced our understanding of galaxy formation. One most important prediction from these simulations is that dwarf and high-redshift galaxies exhibit “bursty” star formation with the ISM characterized as highly chaotic and turbulent. The bursty regime is poorly understood, as different simulation groups produce diverging galaxy properties. I will present a series of my works showing how bursty SF affects our understanding of galactic chemical evolution, cosmic reionization, globular cluster formation, and supermassive black hole growth. I will argue that new observations with JWST and 30 m-class telescopes offer great opportunities to constrain galaxy formation physics adopted in cosmological simulations. I will discuss what theoretical studies are badly demanded regarding the bursty phase of galaxy formation, including SMBH growth and feedback at early times, in order to revolutionize this field over the next 5-10 years.

I am a TAC postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley. I obtained a B.S. in astronomy from USTC in 2013 and Ph.D. in theoretical astrophysics from California Institute of Technology in 2018. I am an expert in applying hydrodynamic simulations and radiative transfer calculations to study a broad spectrum of questions in galaxy formation, the interstellar medium, star formation, supermassive black holes, feedback, and so on.