Hi, welcome to my homepage! I am Simin Tong (click for pronunciation, written as 思敏 童 in Chinese characters), a third-year PhD student at
the University of Leicester working with Prof. Richard Alexander.
Before moving to Leicester, I studied astronomy at the Leiden University, from which I received my master's degree. I did my undergraduate at
the Jilin University (China), where I studied physics and law.
My research focusses on protoplanetary discs. They surround young stars and are thought to be the birth place of planets.
I explore these discs through a combination of theoretical modelling and observational data. During my PhD, my work primarily centres on modelling
the long-term evolution of protoplanetary discs. I model dust and gas components in them to interpret and predict observations by
millimetre-wavelength telescopes.
In my first PhD project, I studied the possibity of distinguishing protoplanetary discs driven by two competing mechanisms and was the first
to identify the challenges of achieving this by gas size measurement.
I recently proposed a new mechanism of forming radially compact protoplanetary discs, capable of reproducing multiple observables. These compact
discs are common but are not as well studied as the radially extended discs, which typically exhibit ring-like features.
