.: My Research

The universe entered a dark age 300,000 years after the big bang as the primordial radiation cooled and shifted into the infrared. Darkness remained until the first non-linearities developed, eventually evolving into the galaxies that illuminate the universe today. To understand how the galaxies in the early universe evolved into those that we see locally requires an understanding of the chemical and star formation history of galaxies. I study how the amount of metals and star formation changes in galaxies over cosmic time using spectroscopy from the optical and near-infrared spectrographs on the Keck and Subaru telescopes on Mauna Kea. I compare the observed star formation and chemical properties of galaxies with detailed theoretical models including stellar evolution synthesis models and detailed photoionization models.