Research Team
Current group members
Raunaq Rai
Raunaq is a first year PhD student, having joined UCL in autumn 2025. His work and thesis makes use of state-of-the-art JWST spectroscopic data to investigate the origins of anomalous chemical abundance ratios seen in galaxies at high redshift (z>6), and the role of bursty star formation in regulating them. Raunaq is also a member of the OMEGA and DAJE-JWST teams, looking at determining the most accurate galaxy abundance measurements in the early Universe with JWST spectroscopy.
Joe Hopkins
Joe is a first year PhD student who will join the group in October 2026. He will be making use of unprecedented JWST/NIRSpec spectra of z>6 ultra-faint galaxies from our DAJE-JWST large program to characterise the properties of the most abundant population of galaxies in the Universe and understand their role in the Cosmic Reionization process.
Past group members
Lucas Barclay
Lucas was a third-year Natural Sciences major at UCL, who joined the group for the 2025/2026 academic year. Lucas worked with archival JWST NIRSpec data to determine the escape fraction of UV ionising photons, through the measurement and characterisation of the UV continuum slopes and strong-line emission of 2000+ galaxies at z>5. Lucas also determined representative constraints on the neutral fraction of the intergalactic medium through Lyman-alpha measurements with the BoRG-JWST survey. Lucas is now a Masters student at the Universe of Cambridge.
Shreya Banerjee
Shreya was a 4th-year MSci Natural Sciences major at UCL, who joined the group for the 2025/2026 academic year. Shreya used models of the Reionization process, together with the latest JWST constraints on the number densities and ionising power of high-redshift galaxies, to determine whether galaxy contributions were sufficient to match unexpectedly high values of Tau (compared to fiducial the Planck values) or whether exotic contributions from Population 3 stars were required. Shreya is now pursuing a Masters program in Space Policy at Cornell University.
Michael Behrman
Michael was a 2nd-year Natural Sciences major at UCL, who joined the group on an 8-week Brian Duff scholarship. Michael's work involved using stacking analyses of z>6 JWST NIRSpec spectra from the BoRG-JWST survey to investigate the prevalence of anomalous nitrogen enrichment in UV-luminous galaxies, and implications for star formation in the early Universe.
Valentina Sangalli
Valentina was an APL and Masters student at the University of Geneva and the University of Milan, who worked in the group for her MSci thesis. Valentina's thesis involved a stacking analysis of high-resolution JWST NIRSpec spectroscopy to characterise the prevalence and properties of supermassive black holes in galaxies at z>6. Valentina is now pursuing a PhD in astrophysics at Université Paris Saclay.