Rychard J. Bouwens is an associate professor at

Leiden University Leiden University (abbreviated as ''LEI''; nl, Universiteit Leiden) is a Public university, public research university in Leiden, Netherlands. The university was founded as a Protestant university in 1575 by William the Silent, William, Prince o ...

. He is also a former member of the

Advanced Camera for Surveys The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) is a third-generation axial instrument aboard the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). The initial design and scientific capabilities of ACS were defined by a team based at Johns Hopkins University. ACS was assembl ...

Guaranteed Time Observation team and postdoctoral research astronomer at the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California syste ...

. He obtained his bachelor's degree in physics, chemistry, and mathematics from

Hope College Hope College is a private Christian liberal arts college in Holland, Michigan. It was originally opened in 1851 as the Pioneer School by Dutch immigrants four years after the community was first settled. The first freshman college class matricul ...

. He then went on to earn his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

physics Physics is the natural science that studies matter, its fundamental constituents, its motion and behavior through space and time, and the related entities of energy and force. "Physical science is that department of knowledge which r ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

under the supervision of

Joseph Silk Joseph Ivor Silk FRS (born 3 December 1942) is a British-American astrophysicist. He was the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at the University of Oxford from 1999 to September 2011. He is an Emeritus Fellow of New College, Oxford and a Fellow ...

and also worked with Tom Broadhurst. He works on the interpretation of high

redshift In physics, a redshift is an increase in the wavelength, and corresponding decrease in the frequency and photon energy, of electromagnetic radiation (such as light). The opposite change, a decrease in wavelength and simultaneous increase in f ...

starbursts. He helped create the Bouwens' Universe Construction Set (BUCS), which can simulate arbitrary galaxy fields and calculate any galaxy observables. Throughout his career, he has broken the record for discovering the most distant galaxy in the universe, including three sources in 2015–2016 with record-breaking spectroscopic redshift measurements at z=7.73 (see

EGS-zs8-1 EGS-zs8-1 is a high-redshift Lyman-break galaxy found at the northern constellation of Boötes. In May 2015, EGS-zs8-1 had the highest spectroscopic redshift of any known galaxy, meaning EGS-zs8-1 was the most distant and the oldest galaxy obser ...

), z=8.68 (see

EGSY8p7 __NOTOC__ EGSY8p7 (EGSY-2008532660) is a distant galaxy in the constellation of Boötes, with a spectroscopic redshift of ''z'' = 8.68 (photometric redshift 8.57), a light travel distance of 13.2 billion light-years from Earth. Theref ...

), and z=11.1 (see

GN-z11 GN-z11 is a high-redshift galaxy found in the constellation Ursa Major. It is one of the farthest known galaxies from Earth ever discovered. The 2015 discovery was published in a 2016 paper headed by Pascal Oesch and Gabriel Brammer (Cosmic Dawn ...

). In a 2011 ''Nature'' paper, his team discovered galaxy

UDFj-39546284 __NOTOC__ UDFj-39546284 is a high- redshift Lyman-break galaxy discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope in infrared Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF) observations in 2009. The object, located in the Fornax constellation, was identified by G. Illi ...

with a photometric redshift of ~10 and was immediately heralded as the most distant source known in the universe. It was later estimated to have a redshift of 11.9. In 2013, he was awarded the Pastoor Schmeitsprijs voor de Sterrenkunde, a prize in the Netherlands given to the researcher (under the age of 40) judged to have made the most significant contribution to astronomy. In 2019, Rychard was the successful principal investigator of the REBELS ALMA Large Program, a 70-hour program to identify a substantial sample of luminous interstellar medium reservoirs in the first 800 million years of the universe at z>~6.5. Thanks to the results from the program, IIand dust were prominently detected in >~18 sources at z>~6.5. Over the course of his career, Bouwens has five published papers in ''Nature'', two as first author, one as second author., and two for ''Nature News & Views''.

References

External links

Profile Page of Leiden University

Home Page of Rychard Bouwens

Subsidies and Prizes of Rychard Bouwens
{{DEFAULTSORT:Bouwens, Rychard 1972 births Living people American astronomers American expatriates in the Netherlands Hope College alumni Leiden University faculty UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni