Jeyhan Kartaltepe

Jeyhan Sevim Kartaltepe is an American astronomer, Associate Professor and Director of the Rochester Institute of Technology Laboratory for Multiwavelength Astrophysics. Her research considers observational astronomy and galaxy evolution. She is a lead investigator on the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey and the COSMOS-Webb Survey conducted on the James Webb Space Telescope.

Early life and education

Kartaltepe is from San Antonio. She studied physics at Colgate University, where she majored in astronomy and spent her free time using the 16-inch telescope on campus. She moved to the University of Hawaii at Mānoa for her graduate studies. She completed a master's degree in 2005, and embarked on a doctorate researching galaxies in the cosmos field. After earning her doctorate Kartaltepe was appointed a postdoctoral researcher at National Optical Astronomy Observatory, where she worked for two years before being made a Hubble Fellow. At the NOAO Kartaltepe investigated the interconnecting roles galaxy mergers and active galactic nuclei play amongst ultraluminous infrared galaxies.

Research and career

In 2015 Kartaltepe joined the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she is Director of the Laboratory for Multiwavelength Astrophysics. She was a founder of the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) collaboration.

She is part of leadership of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey. CEERS is one of the first collaborations to conduct observations using the James Webb Space Telescope, and looks to better understand the abundance of galaxies with photometric redshifts between 3 and 9, as they were 11 – 13 billion years ago. Her other JWST project, COSMOS-Webb, surveyed a large patch of sky with a Near Infrared Camera. It combined these data with mid-infrared images captured simultaneously. COSMOS-Webb looks to probe the first moments in which massive galaxies formed, and, using weak lensing, looked to map the dark matter distribution at early stages. It will help to identify the first fully evolved galaxies, which had stopped being active in the first two billion years afte the Big Bang. COSMOS-Webb received the largest number of observation hours on JWST. Kartaltepe's first observations from COSMOS-Webb identified considerably more early galaxies than expected, indicating that the universe expanded faster than expected.

Alongside her research, Kartaltepe is committed to science communication and outreach. She delivered a talk on the design of the James Webb Space Telescope at the 2022 Falling Walls.

Select publications

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References

Living people
People from San Antonio
Scientists from Texas
Colgate University alumni
University of Hawai{{okinai at Mānoa alumni
Rochester Institute of Technology faculty
American women astronomers
20th-century American women scientists
21st-century American women scientists
20th-century American astronomers
21st-century American astronomers
Year of birth missing (living people)