John Weaver

John Weaver studies how the first galaxies grew and assembled, setting the stage for the rest of cosmic history. He uses the largest telescopes to map out galaxies in space and time and then studies the most extreme among them with detailed spectroscopy. Weaver has led a number of high-profile galaxy catalog teams including COSMOS2020 and UNCOVER, as well as serving as the Principal Investigator of one of the deepest JWST spectroscopic surveys of early bright galaxies. As a Brinson Prize Fellow, his work will focus on ESA’s Euclid Mission, a wide-field near-infrared telescope that is surveying vast regions of our Universe. He will identify the most luminous galaxies stretching back to the Big Bang with unprecedented statistical power, placing fundamentally new constraints on cosmological models. Unsatisfied with purely statistical insights, Weaver will use spectroscopy to identify the tell-tale signature of primordial stars and active black holes in these remarkable cosmic beasts.