Large galaxy redshift surveys make it possible to measure the clustering of galaxies in detail, providing information about galaxies complementary to traditional distribution function studies. I will talk about how to use galaxy clustering to establish the connection between galaxies and dark matter halos to study galaxy formation and evolution. I will give two types of examples, based on our recent work of modeling SDSS galaxy clustering. First, I will present the results on the motion of galaxies inside halos encoded in the redshift-space galaxy clustering. Then with a newly developed conditional color-magnitude distribution (CCMD) formalism, I will describe the modeling of the color and luminosity dependent galaxy clustering, which reveals an interesting tomography of the galaxy color-magnitude diagram.

BIO
Professor Zheng Zheng obtained his BS from Peking University, his MS from Beijing Astronomical Observatory (now NAOC), and his PhD from Ohio State University. He was awarded the Hubble Fellowship and John Bahcall Fellowship and conducted postdoctoral research at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. He then moved to Yale Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics as a YCAA Prize Fellow. He joined University of Utah in 2011 as a faculty member. Professor Zheng Zheng's research focuses on large-scale structure and galaxy clustering, galaxy formation and evolution, high-redshift galaxies and reionization, and cosmology. He also has broad interests in other fields of astrophysics.