Finkelstein Research Group

Our group currently contains four research associates/postdoctoral fellows, and three graduate students. We also work with 10-15 undergraduates through our Vertically Integrated Project group, shown below.

Dr. Mic Bagley

Research Associate

Mic's research focuses on luminosity functions of high-redshift galaxies; they are also the NIRCam lead for CEERS. Recent papers include results from a survey for bright z~9-10 galaxies from Hubble pure parallel surveys, a paper detailing the CEERS NIRCam data reduction, and the NGDEEP survey paper. Mic a world leader in knowlegde of NIRCam data reduction, and their tutorials can be found on the CEERS site.

Dr. Gene Leung

Postdoctoral Fellow

Gene is actively working on many projects, including searching for the extremes of high-redshift galaxies: rare extremely luminous galaxies in our 24 deg2 SHELA survey, and the faintest such galaxies in NGDEEP. He is also studying AGNs in the early universe, in particular probing their hot dust emission with MIRI. Gene also leads our Vertically Integrated Projects undergraduate research program.

Dr. Seiji Fujimoto

Hubble Fellow

Seiji's research is centered primarily around ALMA and JWST observations, of both lensed and unlensed galaxies. While at UT he has written seevral papers, including on ALMA observations of extremely high-redshift galaxies, NIRSpec spectroscopic confirmation of z~8-9 galaxies from CEERS, and NIRSpec followup of very high-redshift galaxies from UNCOVER.

Dr. Anthony Taylor

Postdoctoral Fellow

Anthony recently joined us following his PhD at Wisconsin, where he studied Lyman alpha emitters. He is working on a variety of projects with JWST spectroscopy, presently focusing on searching for signatures of accreting super-massive black holes, and is also involved with many other projects around the group. He also co-leads the VIP undergraduate research group.

Katherine Chworowsky

4th year Graduate Student, NSF GRFP Fellow

Katherine's research focuses on massive galaxies at high redshift. Most recently she has showed that the abundnace of massive galaxies in CEERS is above predictions at z > 4. She shows that this can be explained by a star-formation efficiency which ~doubles between z=4 and z=7, and that there is no tension with LCDM. She is also working on quiescent galaxies at high-redshift in the SHELA field.

Oscar Chavez Ortiz

4th year Graduate Student, NASA FINESST Fellow

Oscar's main focus has been Lyman alpha emitting galaxies (LAEs). He has been using data from the HETDEX survey, as well as our own survey using HETDEX's VIRUS instrument in the North Ecliptic Pole field, to identify LAEs at z~2-3.5, and understand how their emergent Lyman-alpha emission depends on galaxy physical properties, with an aim to ultimately apply this to epoch of reionization studies.

Alexa Morales

3rd year Graduate Student, NSF GRFP Fellow

Alexa's research focuses on the UV colors of early galaxies. She recently studied this in NGDEEP, finding that extremely high-redshift galaxies appear fairly blue, but not so blue that extremely metal-poor stars must be present. She is now expanding this study to include a wider variety of data.

Undergraduate Galaxy Evolution

Vertically Integrated Project Group

We enable undergraduate research "at scale" with our VIP group, part of the larger VIP consortium led by Georgia Tech. Students join this group as sophomores, spending their first year working on a "starter" project. Students move to a “capstone” project by the middle of their junior year, where they pursue research activities of their own devising. Throughout their 2.5 years in the program, studies have access to several levels of mentoring, from senior undergrads, through graduate students, postdocs, and faculty. Students present their results annually at the UT College of Natural Sciences Undergraduate Research Forum, and we aim for students to write a Research Note by the time they graduate.

Current capstone projects include: searching for supermassive black holes in "normal" galaxies in CEERS imaging, studying the consistency of star-formation rate indicators with CEERS spectroscopy, studying outflows with HEDTEX IFU spectroscopy of low-redshift galaixes, and much more. Applications for the VIP program are sent out to astronomy majors annually mid-fall.