research overview
- Dr. Chu is currently focusing on exploring the Earth’s atmosphere, space, and beyond with LIDAR observations, theoretical studies, and numerical modeling. Her research involves the studies of advanced spectroscopy principles and photonics, development of innovative lidar technologies and instrumentation, and investigations of fundamental physical, chemical, and dynamical processes in the Sun-Earth system. Using atmospheric metal species as tracers, her research is exploratory and has led to many science discoveries, especially on the studies of cosmic dust, space-atmosphere interactions, and wave dynamics. Dr. Chu’s ultimate goals are to discover and understand the universal processes that make a planetary atmosphere habitable and sustainable for life as well as to provide innovative lidar solutions to human exploration. Her group’s research is multi-disciplinary in nature, covering a wide spectrum from spectroscopy study and lidar instrumentation to lidar deployment all over the world, to sophisticated data analysis, numerical model development, and atmosphere-space sciences. Dr. Chu is the Principal Investigator on the McMurdo lidar projects that have been observing the Earth’s atmosphere and space for about 15 years in Antarctica. Her group has achieved numerous lidar technology breakthroughs and groundbreaking science discoveries, especially in the Antarctica exploration, for which Dr. Chu was awarded a CEDAR Prize Lecture Award in 2019, an AOGS Distinguished Lecture in 2024, and many of her students have won numerous (~20) prizes and awards from various conferences and sources. These lidar research and science exploration have been a cradle of top PhDs, producing the best crop of young scientists and engineers.
