Garth Illingworth

Garth Illingworth's primary research interests are directed toward understanding when and how galaxies formed. To this end he has studied the structure, kinematics, and stellar populations of nearby elliptical and SO galaxies with the goal of inferring how they were built up in the distant past ("galaxy archeology"). When HST (the Hubble Space Telescope) was launched and the Keck 10-meter telescopes became available, he could directly look at the buildup of galaxies at early times in the life of the universe (using the astronomer's "time machines"). He was deputy Principal Investigator on the Advanced Camera for HST that was launched in 2002 and put onto Hubble by the astronauts during their last, wonderfully successful repair mission to Hubble. This camera has brought us remarkable views of the universe. By using this camera, along with an excellent group of collaborators and postdocs and students, he has been able to view directly galaxies within the first billion years of the Big Bang - looking back in time over 12 billion years. In two recent papers led by postdoc Bouwens the first detections and good limits were placed on galaxies at redshifts 7-10, or looking back over 13 billion years to within 400-600 million years of the Big Bang.

Illingworth is the former chair of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC). The AAAC offers advice to Congress and NSF, NASA and DOE on the implementation of the science program developed by the astronomy science community through studies carried out by the National Academy of Sciences.

Rychard Bouwens

Rychard Bouwens studies the formation and evolution of galaxies through cosmic time. His current focus has been the evolution of galaxies during the first two billion years of the universe (z~3-10). He conducts his studies using data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and large ground-based telescopes like Keck, Subaru, or VLT. His work has primarily centered on the determination of the UV LFs from z~8 to z~4, but has also been investigating the sizes, surface brightnesses, UV colours, dust content, and correlation properties of galaxies at these early times. Rychard did his Ph.D at UC Berkeley under the supervision of Joe Silk and Tom Broadhurst.