Research

My research interests mainly revolve around galaxy formation and evolution in the early Universe: how the first stars and galaxies were formed, how they subsequently started forming elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, and how they brought about the Reionization of the Universe, a major phase transition that turned the neutral Universe back to a (mostly) ionised state.

In my current research, I am involved in multiple different projects with various collaborators at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology. I mainly work on observational data of high-redshift star-forming galaxies from several major observatories. A few of the projects I am involved in are listed below.

  • Together with Renske Smit and Roberto Maiolino, and others, I am involved with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Guaranteed Time Observations (GTO) collaboration of its NIRSpec instrument. In particular, I am an associate member of JADES (the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey), an ambitious joint JWST NIRCam and NIRSpec GTO effort that is conducting the largest extragalactic survey currently planned for JWST, having been allocated more than 800 hours of observing time.
  • We also work with Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and the Very Large Telescope (VLT). By combining observations from these facilities and comparing them to theoretical models, we are exploring the physical conditions of star formation in the very early Universe, and its implications for the subsequent evolution of galaxies up to the present day.
  • With Ewald Puchwein, Girish Kulkarni, Renske Smit, Martin Haehnelt, and Lewis Weinberger, I have further been involved in analysing the Sherwood simulation suite, a set of large-scale cosmological hydrodynamical simulations aiming to accurately model the intergalactic medium. Specifically, we are working on making theoretical predictions of the brightness of this vast reservoir of diffuse gas in the principle emission line of hydrogen, Lyman-alpha.

See the news page for a few short excerpts summarising work I am involved in.