David Setton

David Setton’s research focuses on constraining the physical process that causes the most massive galaxies in the Universe to stop making new stars. He does this by looking to great distances with some of the world’s largest observatories to study galaxies right after they finished their last epoch of star formation, catching them in the act of “quenching.” David uses multi-wavelength observing facilities to study the physical properties of the stars, gas, and supermassive black holes in these galaxies. In his Ph.D. work at the University of Pittsburgh, David measured the structures of “post-starburst” galaxies from the SQuIGGLE sample and used spectra from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument Survey to trace the cosmic evolution in the fraction of quenching galaxies. As a Brinson Prize Fellow at Princeton University, David extends this work using novel samples from the Prime Focus Spectrograph Survey, using the novel instrument on the Subaru telescope to identify and characterize the population of quenching galaxies during the peak of the star formation history of the Universe.