Jeyhan Kartaltepe

Kartaltepe is from San Antonio. She studied physics at Colgate University, where she majored in astronomy and spent her free time using the 16-inch telescope on campus.[1] She moved to the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa for her graduate studies. She completed a master's degree in 2005, and embarked on a doctorate researching galaxies in the cosmos field.[2] After earning her doctorate Kartaltepe was appointed a postdoctoral researcher at National Optical Astronomy Observatory, where she worked for two years before being made a Hubble Fellow. At the NOAO Kartaltepe investigated the interconnecting roles galaxy mergers and active galactic nuclei play amongst ultraluminous infrared galaxies.[3]

In 2015 Kartaltepe joined the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she is Director of the Laboratory for Multiwavelength Astrophysics.[4] She was a founder of the Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey (CANDELS) collaboration.

She is part of leadership of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science Survey.[5] CEERS is one of the first collaborations to conduct observations using the James Webb Space Telescope, and looks to better understand the abundance of galaxies with photometric redshifts between 3 and 9, as they were 11 – 13 billion years ago.[6][7] Her other JWST project, COSMOS-Webb, surveyed a large patch of sky with a Near Infrared Camera. It combined these data with mid-infrared images captured simultaneously.[8][9][10] COSMOS-Webb looks to probe the first moments in which massive galaxies formed, and, using weak lensing, looked to map the dark matter distribution at early stages.[8][11] It will help to identify the first fully evolved galaxies, which had stopped being active in the first two billion years afte the Big Bang.[8] COSMOS-Webb received the largest number of observation hours on JWST.[12] Kartaltepe's first observations from COSMOS-Webb identified considerably more early galaxies than expected, indicating that the universe expanded faster than expected.[11][13]

Alongside her research, Kartaltepe is committed to science communication and outreach. She delivered a talk on the design of the James Webb Space Telescope at the 2022 Falling Walls.

• Norman A. Grogin; Dale D. Kocevski; S. M. Faber; et al. (1 December 2011). "CANDELS: The Cosmic Assembly Near-infrared Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey". The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series. 197 (2): 35. arXiv:1105.3753. Bibcode:2011ApJS..197...35G. doi:10.1088/0067-0049/197/2/35. ISSN 0067-0049. Wikidata Q58474370.
• Jeyhan S. Kartaltepe; Mark Dickinson; David M. Alexander; et al. (31 August 2012). "GOODS-Herschel and CANDELS: the morphologies of ultraluminous infrared galaxies at z ~ 2". The Astrophysical Journal. 757 (1): 23. arXiv:1110.4057. Bibcode:2012ApJ...757...23K. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/757/1/23. ISSN 0004-637X. Wikidata Q57710886.
• O. Ilbert; P. Capak; M. Salvato; et al. (8 December 2008). "COSMOS photometric redshifts with 30-Bands for 2-deg^2^". The Astrophysical Journal. 690 (2): 1236–1249. arXiv:0809.2101. Bibcode:2009ApJ...690.1236I. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/690/2/1236. ISSN 0004-637X. Wikidata Q58035691.