Minjie Lei

Hi! I'm a Physics PhD student at Stanford University. I'm a member of Cosmic Magnetism & Interstellar Physics group at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford. My research is supported by a Stanford Graduate Fellowship in Science & Engineering.

Prior to joining Stanford, I received my B.S. in physics and math from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where I worked on neutrino physics.

Research Interests

I study the physics of the multi-phase interstellar medium (ISM), with a special focus on untangling the structures of the Galactic magnetic field with data-driven approaches.

HI Phase Decomposition

Resolving the multi-phase composition of neutral hydrogen (HI) from a morphological perspective

Galactic Magnetic Field

Untangling the structures of the 3D, multi-phase Galactic magnetic field using data-driven approaches.

Polarized Dust & Synchrotron Emission

Polarization as a magnetic field tracer, dust-synchrotron connection, implication for CMB foreground

Astrostatistics

Applied statistics in astronomy: wavelet scattering transform, Bayesian inference, interpretable ML

Projects

SS+VAE WNM and CNM Map

Morphology-Based HI Phase Separation with Scattering Spectra and Variational Autoencoders

Lei et al., in prep

Diagram of a model of phase-dependent magnetic field disorder

A New Constraint on the Relative Disorder of Magnetic Fields between Neutral ISM Phases

Lei & Clark, 2024

Diagram of the wavelet scattering transform applied to HI emission data

Probing the Cold Neutral Medium through HI Emission Morphology with the Scattering Transform

Lei & Clark 2023

Neutrino interaction in the MicroBooNE detector

Implicit Neural Representation as a Differentiable Surrogate for Photon Propagation in a Monolithic Neutrino Detector

Minjie Lei, K. V. Tsang, et al. 2022