Rate My Professor Chia Min Tan

Dr. Chia Min Tan serves as an Associate Lecturer in the Faculty of Science and Engineering at Curtin University, where she is affiliated with the Curtin Institute of Radio Astronomy (CIRA) and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR) at Curtin. Her research centers on pulsar astronomy, with a particular emphasis on detecting and characterizing long-period pulsars, nulling pulsars, and radio transients. Tan utilizes advanced radio telescopes including the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME), the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA), and the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) to conduct these investigations. She contributes to major surveys such as the SMART survey with MWA, where she co-leads the second-pass deep processing to enhance sensitivity for long-period and exotic pulsars, including binaries and millisecond pulsars. This work involves migrating software to high-performance computing platforms like Pawsey’s Setonix and Swinburne’s Ngarrgu Tindebeek.

Tan completed her PhD at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, during which she discovered a 23.4-second period long-period radio transient, one of the slowest known pulsars, challenging models of neutron star spin-down and evolution. Her publication record includes over 33 research works with more than 915 citations. Key contributions encompass co-authorship on 'CHIME All-sky Multiday Pulsar Stacking Search (CHAMPSS)' (2025), which details a stacking method for multiday pulsar detection; 'The second set of pulsar discoveries by CHIME/FRB/Pulsar' (2023); 'CHIME/FRB/Pulsar discovery of a nearby long period radio transient with a timing glitch' (2024); 'Multiwavelength constraints on the origin of a nearby long-period transient' (2024); and 'Measuring Pulsar Masses with CHIME' (2023), constraining masses of millisecond pulsars via Shapiro delay modeling. At CIRA, she supervises Higher Degree by Research students on projects like searching for exotic pulsars in close binary systems and probing the local interstellar medium with low-frequency pulsar observations. She also contributed to the high-time-resolution southern sky survey using MWA, producing four petabytes of data.