My research focuses on the origins of supermassive black holes, reionisation, and the first galaxies in quasar environments. You can read about my research (explained simply) on this page, and find my publication list and supplementary paper data here. I obtained my PhD at the University of Cambridge, and conducted two postdoc positions at University College London and at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg before starting the Frontier Research Group.

Benedetta studies the intergalactic medium both during Hydrogen reionisation and Helium reionisation using both modelling and observations. Her ongoing research is attempting to directly measure the neutral fraction at z~6 using the morphology of gaps in the Lyman-alpha forest. Benedetta obtained her PhD from the University of Bonn. 

Klaudia is conducting her PhD in the group on the topic of quasars and their proximate Lyman-alpha emitters: galaxies living very close to bright quasars in the early Universe, such that their intrinsically double-peaked Lyman-alpha emission line is visible. She is a member of IMPRS-Heidelberg. Her first paper, on LAE-11 at z=6.6, is published: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12256

Shengxiu has joined our group on a CSC Scholarship. He is using LBT-LUCI observations of SDSS-RM quasars to obtain better virial estimator of black hole mass using the Paschen-series emission lines.

Arpita started her PhD in 2025. She is using SphereX data to study hot dusty structures around quasars and understand the conditions that shape their presence and properties.

Seyeon is a joint PhD student between our group and the REIGM theory research group at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. She is developing numerical simulations of the IGM which will enable us to constrain reionisation history and the properties of Warm Dark Matter from GHOSTLy data.

Moritz is working under the joint supervision of Shengxiu Sun to try to recover the M-sigma relation for bright quasars. He is employing spectroscopy from LATIS and multi-band JWST observations.

Daniel is doing his master's thesis on the topic of the cosmic abundance of Aluminium. A so-called "odd" element, Aluminium should be an excellent tracer of the global level of processing of atoms through stellar fusion.

Juri did an internship in our group followed by a bachelor's thesis on the topic of the relation between BLR size and luminosity in bright quasars. A paper based on this work is in prep.

Yu-Ruei did his master's thesis in our group, looking for presence of a galaxy overdensity in one of the most transparent Lyman-alpha forest sightlines during reionisation.

Lasse did his master's thesis with us looking for local analogues of Little Red Dots. He found a few one ones! As well as a very strange changing-look AGN (?). He is moving to Hamburg Observatory for his PhD in Astrophysics. A paper based on his thesis is in prep.

Goraksh has joined the group for a year with an IISER-MPG scholarship! He performed forward-modelling the galaxy-IGM connection in various models of reionisation. He is moving on to a PhD in Cosmology in Munich, and a paper based on his thesis is in prep.

Jonathan is a master student working on a thesis on the topic of high-redshift quasars. He is looking for variability in the infrared brightness of the first quasars using archival and new data from the GROND instrument. A paper based on his thesis results is in prep.

Saba is a PhD student at the University of Chicago who previously did an internship in Heidelberg as an MPIA summer student. She visited us to finish a project which arose from that internship: putting the tightest constraints on temperature fluctuations in the intergalactic medium arising form Helium reionisation at z~4. Her paper based on this work was accepted in ApJ: Link

Bartosz was a student at the University of Heidelberg who conducted his master's thesis on the topic of quasar evolution. He found close analogues of the first quasars at later times using eBOSS and X-Shooter data.

Ander conducted a master's thesis studying the intergalactic medium. He is developing a new method for constraining the nature of dark matter using machine-learning of the Lyman-alpha forest. Ander works in collaboration with Dr. Prakash Gaikwad of the REIGM research group at MPIA. Ander is now a PhD student in the IMPRS-TRUST program at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems in Kaiserlautern.

His thesis work has been submitted to A&A: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2024arXiv241117853A