Rachel Bezanson

Rachel Bezanson is an observational astronomer who studies the formation and evolution of massive galaxies through cosmic time. She attended Barnard College for undergrad and obtained her PhD at Yale University in 2013. She was a Hubble fellow at the University of Arizona, a Russell fellow at Princeton University before joining the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh in 2017.

The fast and the furious: a view from UNCOVER and beyond

In two short years, JWST has set distance records, found that galaxy and supermassive black hole formation was earlier and more rapid than we had ever expected. I will highlight results from the UNCOVER Treasury program. UNCOVER includes ultradeep NIRCam images of Abell 2744 and targeted hundreds of JWST-selected objects with deep NIRSpec PRISM spectra. These rich data have enabled spectroscopic studies of anticipated galaxy populations, including some of the most distant galaxies at cosmic dawn and the lowest mass systems that reionized the Universe and the unexpected, including extreme supermassive black holes and brown dwarfs.