Keming Zhang grew up in Beijing, China, where he developed a passion for astronomy as an amateur astronomer and astrophotographer. He obtained his bachelor’s in astrophysics from Columbia University in New York in 2018 and PhD in astrophysics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2023. Before coming to MIT, Keming was an Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California San Diego.

Keming’s research lies at the intersection of gravitational microlensing, extrasolar planets, and machine learning. He is particularly interested in the connection between circumbinary planets (CBPs) and free-floating planets (FFPs), as ejection from circumbinary systems is thought to be a major pathway for producing FFPs. As a Sagan Fellow, Keming will first validate current microlensing FFP candidates with high angular resolution imaging. At the same time, Keming will advance the theory and phenomenology of high-order microlensing, as well as develop physics-informed machine learning models. These efforts will provide effective computational tools to fully exploit the vast data from the forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s microlensing survey for studies of exoplanet demographics, including CBPs and beyond.