Minjung Park

MJ is a Kavli Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at Kavli Institute for Cosmology, Cambridge (KICC) and at the Department of Physics (Cavendish Laboratory). She is interested in understanding how galaxies formed in the early universe and how they evolved throughout cosmic time. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the formation of massive quiescent galaxies – galaxies that no longer form stars and remain red and dead (“quenched”). She uses both observational and theoretical techniques to study their star-formation histories, quenching mechanisms, and chemical abundances. She has also developed new stellar population models which can be used to fit observed galaxy spectra and derive accurate properties of galaxies (e.g., age and mass).

As a Research Fellow at King’s, she plans to apply the new models she developed to massive quiescent galaxies found in the early Universe, in the first billion years after the Big Bang. The new models will help reveal their true formation histories, answering one of the key questions in astronomy – how the first galaxies in the Universe grow into the most massive galaxies today.

MJ completed her PhD in Astronomy & Astrophysics at Harvard University in 2025. She is originally from Seoul, South Korea. She did her undergrad and master’s in astronomy at Yonsei University, where she studied the origin of diverse morphology/shapes of galaxies using high-resolution cosmological galaxy simulations.