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Dominika Wylezalek Appointed New Pro­fes­sor at ZAH

Dominika Wylezalek
Prof. Dominika Wylezalek

STRUC­TURES member Dominika Wylezalek has been appointed as a new Pro­fes­sor for Extragalactic Astrophysics at the Center for Astronomy at Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­si­ty (ZAH) – one of the participating institutions in STRUC­TURES – and Director at the Astronomisches Rechen-Institut (ARI), effective March 1, 2025. She will lead the re­search group “Galaxy Evolution and AGN (GALENA)” at ARI, focusing on the interplay between supermassive black holes and galaxy evolution.

Prof. Dr. Wylezalek's re­search employs multi-wavelength observations from leading ground- and space-based telescopes to investigate how supermassive black holes influence their host galaxies across different cosmic epochs. In her research, Prof. Wylezalek deals with the physical processes that influence the formation and evolution of galaxies. Using spectroscopic measurements, she studies how active galactic nuclei – that is, galactic cores (quasars) fed by supermassive black holes – impact on the development of their host galaxies and their galactic environment. She has already been able to show that the energy pumped into the environment from these black holes has a strong influence on the formation of stars and hence on the present form of galaxies. Using data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) she discovered a galaxy cluster with a large number of massive galaxies emerging around an extremely red quasar. It stems from the cosmological epoch of very active star formation about ten billion years ago. Wylezalek’s observations help us to understand how galaxies in the early universe melted into the cosmic web we see today.

Dominika Wylezalek studied physics at Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­si­ty (Bachelor) and Uni­ver­si­ty of Cambridge (Master). In 2014 she earned her doctorate from the Ludwig Maximilian Uni­ver­si­ty of Munich (LMU) as a fellow of the International Max Planck Re­search School on Astrophysics (IMPRS) at the Eu­ro­pean Southern Observatory (ESO) in Garching near Munich. She went on to do postdoctoral re­search at Johns Hopkins Uni­ver­si­ty in Baltimore (USA) and at ESO Garching as a re­search fellow. Since 2020, Dr Wylezalek has led a DFG Emmy Noether junior re­search group at Hei­del­berg Uni­ver­si­ty. For her contributions to observational astrophysics, the scien­tist has been honoured with the 2023 MERAC Prize of the Eu­ro­pean Astronomical Society (EAS), the 2023 Ludwig Biermann Award of the German Astronomical Society (AG) and the 2024 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize by the German Re­search Foundation (DFG).

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