Featured Faculty

Dr. Kartaltepe received her Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Hawaii in 2009. Her dissertation focused on the role of galaxy mergers in galaxy evolution and their impact on the properties of luminous infrared galaxies. She then began a postdoctoral research position at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, working with observations of galaxies from the newly launched Herschel Space Observatory and recently serviced Hubble Space Telescope. Kartaltepe joined RIT in 2015.

Dr. Kartaltepe is a leading member of several international collaborations. In 2018, she became a co-lead of the COSMOS collaboration, a group of ~200 astronomers all over the world working on multiwavelength observations of the COSMOS field. She is a co-investigator of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Early Release Science program, CEERS, one of the first programs to begin observing the distant universe in 2022. She is also the PI of the largest JWST Cycle 1 observing program, COSMOS-Web, which began collecting data in early 2023.

In 2022, Kartaltepe's work focused on preparations for JWST observations using simulated data and then early science results once the initial data were taken in June. This includes the discovery of a galaxy in the very early universe from CEERS observations and a quantitative analysis of the structures of galaxies in the early universe. Kartaltepe is also leading a major effort to build a large publicly accessible database of all spectroscopy available in the COSMOS field for an estimated 250,000 galaxies. In total, Kartaltepe submitted 33 articles to journals, 23 of which were published or in press by the end of 2022. Four of these publications were led by RIT graduate students.

Jeyhan Kartaltepe
Associate Professor
School of Physics and Astronomy
College of Science