News

Milestones from my PhD — from discovering the most distant confirmed rotating disc galaxy to spotting oxygen in the early Universe, and joining a new ALMA programme to probe the first galaxies.

REBELS-25: my first PhD paper & press release

For my first PhD project, I led a study of a galaxy at z=7.31, when the Universe was only ~700 million years old, known as REBELS-25. Against expectations, we found it’s a dynamically cold, rotation-supported disc — more like an orderly Milky Way–style spiral than the turbulent systems we thought dominated the early Universe.
This is the most distant, confirmed rotating disc galaxy (so far), and it pushes theories about how quickly galaxies can settle into stable discs.

See the ESO press release here and the CNN article here.

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/L. Rowland et al./ESO/J. Dunlop et al. Ack.: CASU, CALET

20 March 2025 — Oxygen in the most distant confirmed galaxy (JADES-GS-z14-0)

Using ALMA, our community detected oxygen in JADES-GS-z14-0, locking in its extreme distance and showing that chemical enrichment began astonishingly early — when the Universe was under ~300 million years old.

Read the ESO press release here

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Carniani et al./S. Schouws et al/JWST: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Brant Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), Ben Johnson (CfA), Sandro Tacchella (Cambridge), Phill Cargile (CfA)

4 September 2025 — PHOENIX: new ALMA Large Programme

I’m a member of the PHOENIX collaboration, a newly awarded 113 hour ALMA Large Programme with 26 hours of joint JWST observations, designed to uncover how the first galaxies assembled so rapidly. By targeting [OIII]88 μm and dust continuum emission, PHOENIX provides the far-infrared counterpart to JWST’s UV/optical picture, allowing us to probe obscured star formation, dust buildup, and the physical conditions of the early interstellar medium.

Read the Leiden news article here: (in Dutch) (in English)

17 September 2025 — WEAVE-ing the Chemical Story of Local Dwarf Starbursts

I’m PI of ‘WEAVE-ing the Chemical Story of Local Dwarf Starbursts’, a project awarded observing time with the WEAVE LIFU spectrograph on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope. The program maps the spatial distribution of chemical elements in nearby dwarf starburst galaxies, which serve as accessible analogues to the rapidly growing galaxies observed at high redshift with JWST. Our goal is to understand how galaxies enrich themselves with metals, and how those metals are distributed through the interstellar medium.

See the NWO announcement here