Frontier Research Group
@ University of Heidelberg
The new Frontier Research Group started in August 2023 at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, Heidelberg, Germany ! Research conducted by the group focuses on observational cosmology during the first billion years of the Universe - when the first galaxies and first supermassive black holes formed, and destroyed the neutral hydrogen which filled the Universe in the process of reionisation.
We are recruiting two PhD students for a start in September 2025 ! Applications are now closed.
The group is currently offering multiple projects for Masters students at the University of Heidelberg! See more info here:
Masters projects
We are proudly supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through an Emmy Noether Junior Research Group grant.
Sponsored by
Group Members
Sarah Bosman - Group leader
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 Spina - Postdoc
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 Protusova - PhD student
Klaudia is conducting her PhD in the group on the topic of 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 submitted: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.12256
Saba Etezad-Razavi - visiting PhD student
Saba is a PhD student at the University of Chicago who previously did an internship in Heidelberg as an MPIA summer intern. She is visiting 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.
Jonathan Konrad - Master student
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.
Luca Prechtel - Master student
Luca recently started exploring a master's thesis on the topic of hydrogen reionisation. He will be looking for correlations between the Lyman-alpha forest and the presence of early galaxies in the same volume.
Former group Members
Bartosz Capecki - Master student
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 Artola - Master student
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
Recent publications
Bosman & Davies 2024, A&A:
A measurement of the escaping ionising efficiency of galaxies at redshift 5