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Professor James S Dunlop
On Monday 29th September 2025, at 7pm
Due to the finite speed of light, astronomers have the unique privilege of being able to look back in time, now reaching back almost to the beginning of our Universe. Within this exploration of cosmic history, a key and long-standing goal of astrophysics and cosmology is to discover and study the first objects that formed out of the previously smooth debris from the Big Bang. Crucially, this quest includes the search for the first stars and galaxies which lit up the Universe and created the elements required for life.
I will set the scene for this quest and review recent progress at the research frontier, culminating in a presentation and discussion of the latest results from the first two years of observing with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). Until now the observational search for so-called 'cosmic dawn' was limited by the available technology. Now, given the remarkable performance of JWST, this appears to no longer be the case - we may finally be on the verge of discovering 'First Light'.
Jim Dunlop studied Physics at Dundee in Scotland, before moving to Edinburgh where he obtained a PhD in Astrophysics in 1988. After 7 years working in England (where he helped establish the Astrophysics group in Liverpool) he returned to the University of Edinburgh and has worked at the School of Physics & Astronomy ever since, apart from two periods in Vancouver, the latter as a Canada Research Chair. From 2004 to 2008 and again from 2015 to 2018 he was Head of the University's Institute for Astronomy. From 2019 to 2024, Jim was Head of the School of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Edinburgh.
Jim Dunlop is an observational cosmologist who uses the world's largest telescopes (including telescopes in space such as the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the VISTA and ALMA telescopes in Chile) to study cosmic history back to the formation and birth of the first stars and galaxies. He has been awarded a Wolfson Research Merit Award by the Royal Society, and an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council. Jim is an elected Fellow of the Institute for Physics (FInstP) and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE), and has received the George Darwin Lectureship (2014) and the Herschel Medal (2016) from the Royal Astronomical Society. In 2016 he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).
Jim Dunlop’s research has made extensive use of NASA facilities, especially the “Great Observatories“, often pushing these space-based observing platforms to the limits of their capabilities: he was the first non-US PI of a major (300-hr) legacy observing program on the Spitzer space observatory, was European co-founder of the 1000-orbit HST CANDELS Treasury program, and co-led the HST Hubble Ultra Deep Field 2012 (HUDF12) program which produced the deepest ever near-infrared image of the sky achieved with Hubble.
Jim is now PI of the largest Cycle-1 James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) “Galaxies” program: PRIMER, and has recently been awarded a Royal Society Research Professorship to enable him to focus again on research for the next 5 years.