Rohan Naidu

I am a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. I study the first stars and galaxies with a “near-and-far” approach, integrating direct observations with telescopes like JWST with archeological studies set in our own Milky Way. I received my PhD in Astronomy, advised by Prof. Charlie Conroy, from Harvard University in May 2022. Prior to this, I was part of the first ever graduating class of 150 students of Yale-NUS College, Singapore, which is Asia’s first liberal arts college.

All the Little Things: Seeking Signatures of Pop III Stars and the Protagonists of Reionization with JWST

Dwarf galaxies hold the key to several frontiers of astrophysics – e.g., they are predicted to host the most metal-poor first generations of stars that may have driven cosmic reionization. Their low luminosity, however, renders spectroscopy at cosmological distances challenging. In this talk I will present results from a Cycle 2 JWST survey (“All the Little Things”) which has acquired the deepest NIRCam grism spectroscopy yet, at JWST’s most sensitive wavelength (3-4 micron), over the powerful gravitational lensing cluster Abell 2744 (mean magnification >2) to collect one of the largest samples of dwarf galaxies beyond the local universe.