Ye Shuhua

Ye Shuhua (; born June 21, 1927) is a Chinese astronomer and professor at Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, known for achieving one of the world's most precise measurements of Universal Time in the 1960s, and for establishing the very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) and satellite laser ranging (SLR) techniques in China.

Ye served as President of Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, Vice-President of the Chinese Astronomical Society, and Vice-President of the International Astronomical Union. She is a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and a foreign fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society of Britain. The asteroid 3241 Yeshuhua is named after her.

Early life Ye Shuhua was born June 21, 1927, in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. She spent most of her school years during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45), and had to move repeatedly with her family from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, Shaoguan, and Lian County, because of the war.

After the surrender of Japan in 1945, Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou resumed its admissions. Ye hoped to study literature at the university, but her father wanted her to study medicine for better career prospects. She was not interested in medicine, and as a compromise with her father, she agreed to study mathematics instead. At the time, mathematics and astronomy were under the same department at Sun Yat-sen University, and under the influence of Professor Zou Yixin, she later chose to major in astronomy.

Selected publications Optical observations of time and latitude and the determining of the earth rotation parameters. Proceedings of IAU Colloquium No. 63. Dordrecht: D.Reidel Publishing Company: pp. 11–23. (1982) VLBI measurements of radio positions at three stations. Proceedings of IAU Colloquium No. 63. Dordrecht: D.Reidel Publishing Company: pp. 329–336. (1982) Note on the terrestrial reference system for geodynamics. Proceedings of the 5th IAG Symposium. Washington: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: p. 46. (1982) Intercomparison of celestial reference frame-general principle. Reference Frames in Astronomy and Geophysics. Kluwer Acad Publ: pp. 295–304. (1989) with Wan T.S., Qian Z.H. Progress on Chinese VLBI Network Project. Radio Interferometry. Proceedings of IAU Colloquium No. 131, Provo, Utah: Astronomical Society of the Pacific: pp. 386–389. (1991)