RESEARCH

I seek to understand how galaxies formed and evolved when the Universe was only a fraction of its present age. My research is focused through three key projects:

1. (1)The massive, 200-hour JWST Guaranteed Time Observations CANUCS program that will let us investigate in detail the inner workings of thousands of low-mass galaxies at Cosmic Noon (z~2) and Cosmic Dawn (z>6). Following the successful JWST launch on 25 December 2021, we obtained the first batch of our CANUCS data in October 2022! 
   

2. (2)The 68-night CFHT CLAUDS survey that together with affiliated deep surveys from other telescopes lets us use several million galaxies over a wide redshift range to do enormously large statistical studies of the processes that drive galaxy evolution.  CLAUDS is now joined by its newer sibling, DEUS, which aims to cover 10 sq degrees in the Euclid Deep Field North and study how galaxy properties relate to their location within the high-redshift Cosmic Web.
   

3. (3)The GIRMOS AO-fed, multi-IFU spectrograph now under construction by a partnership of Canadian institutions, including our team at Saint Mary’s. GIRMOS will let us do detailed, spatially-resolved studies of 100’s of distant galaxies when commissioned at Gemini-North later this decade.
   

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NEWS

2023 May 9-11:  Speaking about our JWST-based research at the annual meeting of CRAQ

Honoured to be the keynote speaker at the 2023 annual meeting of the Centre de Recherche en astrophysique du Québec.  Of course, my talk is about the discoveries that CANUCS has been making with JWST.

2023 March 24:  Shannon cleans up at the Three Minute Thesis competition

Shannon won the first place in this year’s Three Minute Thesis competition at SMU.   And... she also got the People’s Choice award! Shannon’s presentation topic was “How does a galaxy die? Determining the star formation history from a galaxy’s colour’.

Well done, Shannon!  Next step: regional TMT competition!

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