Alice Shapley: “Traveling Back in Time to the Birth of Galaxies”

Featured Professor

Alice Shapley

Vice Chair for Astronomy and Astrophysics
Professor, Department of Physics and AstronomyAlice Shapley is an observational astronomer studying how galaxies form and evolve in the early universe. She is currently a full professor and the Vice Chair for Astronomy and Astrophysics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA. She received her AB from Harvard-Radcliffe University in 1997, and her PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 2003. She was a Miller Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2003-2005 before joining the faculty of the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University as an assistant professor in 2005. In 2007, Alice accepted an associate professor position at UCLA in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. She received both Alfred P. Sloan and David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowships in 2006 and has been honored as the 2014 Aaronson Lecturer at the University of Arizona/Steward Observatory, the 2018 Biermann Lecturer at the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, and the 2019 AAS Kavli Plenary Lecturer.

Alice uses both large ground-based telescopes and space-based facilities to collect optical and infrared images and spectra of distant galaxies observed in the early universe in order to understand galaxy formation and evolution. She has co-authored ~200 papers and in 2011 wrote an invited review of “Physical Properties of Galaxies at z=2-4” for the Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. Alice has led large observing programs both on the ground using the Keck Observatory and in space using the Hubble Space Telescope. She will also be one of the first users of the James Webb Space Telescope, which was recently launched to a distance of one million miles from Earth and is anticipated to transform studies of galaxy formation.