What I Do...
I am a Giacconi Postdoctoral Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). I completed my Ph.D. in 2023 at the University of Texas at Austin, studying early galaxies with Prof. Steven Finkelstein.
I study galaxies from the first billion years of the Universe's history, and my goal is to understand how those galaxies, and the Universe itself, evolved into the one we live in today.
THRILS: The High-(Redshift+Ionization) Line Search
Dr. Taylor Hutchison and I are the leads of The High-(Redshift+Ionization) Line Search (THRILS) program on JWST (GO-5507). This program was awarded 68 hours of telescope time to discover and study the physical conditions of galaxies in the early Universe. The survey design and program overview paper is available below.
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​Data from this program has also led to the exciting discovery of Iron in a Little Red Dot (LRD), led by Dr. Erini Lambrides. Link to this publication is below.
With some of the first data from JWST, I discovered the most distant (at the time) active supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy > 600 Myr after the Big Bang: CEERS_1019. This discovery has interesting implications for how black holes form and grow in the early Universe and garnered widespread media attention following a NASA press release.
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This paper was one of the first to present NIRSpec data from the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) team, of which I am a member.
Discovery of the Most Distant Supermassive Black Hole
Spectral Templates for Early Galaxies
In preparation for early-Universe studies with JWST, Dr. Taylor Hutchison and I developed representative templates of young, star-forming galaxies for use in model fitting. These templates filled a parameter space not covered by traditional template sets, enabling improved measurements of probable distances to early galaxies with the new datasets.
Islands of Reionization
I am the lead of a Keck Observatory program searching for Lyman-alpha emission in galaxies at redshift 9 (only 500 million years after the Big Bang). I have been awarded a total of 8 nights on the 10 m Keck I Telescope through NASA over 4 semesters (2018-2019). All of this data has been acquired, and the publication on the program and results is available here: Link to the Paper.
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Ultimately this program was successful as I confirmed the distance to the second-highest redshift Lyman-alpha emitting galaxy, and discovered the presence of an ionized bubble in the heart of the reionization era.
SEARCHING FOR LYMAN-ALPHA IN THE EARLY UNIVERSE
My master's thesis work was to search for Lyman-Alpha emission from galaxies at the end of the epoch of reionization using grism (slitless spectroscopy) data from the Hubble Space Telescope taken for the Faint Infrared Grism Survey (FIGS). I created an automated line-finding code to search through all of the spectra for the high-redshift candidates in the sample. I successfully detected a Lyman-Alpha line in a galaxy at z=7.452, which is also the highest equivalent-width Lyman-Alpha line above redshift 7. Published paper can be found here!
