Dr Lily Whitler (Gavin Boyle Fellow in Exoplanetary Science)

Tell us about your work. 

In the simplest terms, my work is like taking a baby picture of the universe. I study what the universe looked like when it was very young, so that we can understand how it grew into what we see today. Specifically, I focus on the very earliest galaxies, those that formed within the first billion years of the universe’s history. To put that into perspective, the universe itself is around fourteen billion years old. By observing these ancient galaxies, I aim to understand how they first began forming stars and how they evolved over time.

What motivates you to study the universe? 

It’s part of the human condition to want to understand the universe. We’ve been doing it for as long as we’ve existed as a species, looking up at the night sky and trying to make sense of our place within it. That enduring curiosity is a big part of what motivates me. The key difference today is that we have far better technology than anything available to people in the past. We’re still asking the same fundamental questions, but now we have the tools to start answering them.

What equipment do you use in your work? 

I mostly use the James Webb Space Telescope, which is currently NASA’s flagship mission. The telescope orbits a point in space about a million miles away from Earth, carries out its observations and then links the data back to Earth via the Deep Space Network. I spend most of my time processing, analysing, and interpreting those observations.

Where is your research taking you in the future? 

I am focused on a period known as the Cosmic Dawn and the Epoch of Reionisation, when the very first galaxies formed out of a soup of gas and began to influence their wider surroundings. Until now, we’ve had strong theoretical expectations for how this era unfolded, but very limited observational evidence. With the James Webb Space Telescope, and with upcoming instruments like the Roman Space Telescope launching later this year, we’re finally able to observe this period in detail. In many ways, it’s one of the last major epochs of the universe’s history that we haven’t been able to study directly, and I’m very excited to begin understanding it properly.