91Ó°ÊÓ

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Physics and Engineering Physics

Xiaosheng Huang

Xiaosheng Huang headshot

Xiaosheng Huang

John Nobili, S.J. Professor

Xiaosheng Huang earned his B.S. and M.A. in Physics from Kent State University in 1995 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. His graduate work at Berkeley ranged from the spectroscopic confirmation and modeling of a cluster-scale strong lens to transport measurements of carbon-doped MgBâ‚‚ superconductors under hydrostatic pressure. From 2005 to 2012, Xiaosheng was a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) with the Supernova Cosmology Project, where he worked on the Hubble Space Telescope Cluster Supernova Survey to constrain dark energy, and discovered a high redshift cluster lens at z = 1.03. He joined the faculty of the University of San Francisco in 2012 and was promoted to Professor in 2024. At USF his team, made up mostly of undergraduates, led the deep-learning searches that found thousands of strong gravitational lens candidates in the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys and, more recently, spectroscopic lens searches in DESI data that have added thousands more; co-developed GIGA-Lens, a GPU-accelerated Bayesian framework for lens modeling; and leads the multi-institutional DESI Strong Lens Foundry, which confirms and models these lenses with Hubble, Keck, and VLT observations. He is Principal Investigator of three Hubble Space Telescope programs, a Co-Investigator on several other HST programs as well as James Webb and Roman Space Telescope programs. He has been a Faculty Affiliate with LBNL for over 20 years. At 91Ó°ÊÓ, Xiaosheng is interested in 1) strong lensing as a geometric probe of dark energy, dark matter, and the Hubble constant, through cluster and galaxy-scale lenses, and through gravitationally lensed supernovae; and 2) developing AI agentic workflows for strong lens searches and modeling. He is passionate about bringing undergraduates into every stage of this research: he has mentored more than fifty undergraduate researchers, many of whom are co-authors or lead authors of peer-reviewed publications in premier journals in astrophysics.

Publications

Selected recent publications (most recent first)

  1. X. Huang, L. Upson, N. Ratier-Werbin, H. Lu, S. Xu, et al. 2026, submitted to The Astrophysical Journal, arXiv:2606.30633. GIGA-Lens 2.0: Strong-Lens Modeling on Multiple GPU Nodes
  2. F. Urcelay, X. Huang, W. Sheu, J. H. O'Donnell, T. Jeltema, et al. 2026, submitted to The Astrophysical Journal, arXiv:2602.16077. The Carousel Lens II: Cosmological Constraints with GIGA-Lens.
  3. J. S. M. Karp, D. J. Schlegel, X. Huang, N. Padmanabhan, A. S. Bolton, et al. 2026, The Astrophysical Journal, 999, 198. The DESI Single Fiber Lens Search I: Four Thousand Spectroscopically Selected Galaxy–Galaxy Gravitational Lens Candidates.
  4. X. Huang, S. Baltasar, N. Ratier-Werbin, C. Storfer, W. Sheu, et al. 2026, The Astrophysical Journal, 998, 69. DESI Strong Lens Foundry I: HST Observations and Modeling with GIGA-Lens.
  5. Y.-M. Hsu, X. Huang, C. J. Storfer, J. C. Inchausti, D. Schlegel, et al. 2026, The Astrophysical Journal Supplemental Series, 282, 41. A New Way to Discover Strong Gravitational Lenses: Pairwise Spectroscopic Search from DESI DR1.
  6. E. Silver, R. Wang, X. Huang, A. Bolton, C. Storfer, & S. Banka 2025, The Astrophysical Journal, 994, 117. ML-Driven Strong Lens Discoveries: Down to θ_E ∼ 0.03″ and M_halo < 10¹¹ M⊙.
  7. W. Sheu, A. Cikota, X. Huang, K. Glazebrook, C. Storfer, et al. 2024, The Astrophysical Journal, 973, 3. The Carousel Lens: A Well-modeled Strong Lens with Multiple Sources Spectroscopically Confirmed by VLT/MUSE.
  8. A. Gu, X. Huang, W. Sheu, G. Aldering, A. S. Bolton, et al. 2022, The Astrophysical Journal, 935, 49. GIGA-Lens: Fast Bayesian Inference for Strong Gravitational Lens Modeling.
  9. X. Huang, C. Storfer, A. Gu, V. Ravi, A. Pilon, et al. 2021, The Astrophysical Journal, 909, 27. Discovering New Strong Gravitational Lenses in the DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys.
  10. X. Huang, C. Storfer, V. Ravi, A. Pilon, M. Domingo, et al. 2020, The Astrophysical Journal, 894, 78. Finding Strong Gravitational Lenses in the DESI DECam Legacy Survey.