Dr. John Weaver to bring 2025 Brinson Prize Fellowship to MKI

The MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research welcomes 2025 Brinson Prize Fellow Dr. John Weaver, who will bring his fellowship to MKI in September 2025.

The title of his project is “Resolving the Galaxy Crisis at Cosmic Dawn.”

John Weaver studies how the first galaxies grew and assembled, setting the stage for the rest of cosmic history. He uses the largest telescopes to map out galaxies in space and time and then studies the most extreme among them with detailed spectroscopy. Weaver has led a number of high-profile galaxy catalog teams including COSMOS2020 and UNCOVER, and has served as the Principal Investigator of one of the deepest JWST spectroscopic surveys of early bright galaxies. As a Brinson Prize Fellow, his work will focus on ESA’s Euclid Mission, a wide-field near-infrared telescope that is surveying vast regions of our Universe. He will identify the most luminous galaxies stretching back to the Big Bang with unprecedented statistical power, placing fundamentally new constraints on cosmological models. Unsatisfied with purely statistical insights, Weaver will use spectroscopy to identify the tell-tale signature of primordial stars and active black holes in these remarkable cosmic beasts.
Weaver received the Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of Copenhagen and is currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Established in 2021, the Brinson Prize Fellowship Program supports ambitious research in the fields of astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology, with a focus on projects that complement and capitalize on the latest space science. Rapid advances and new technology are propelling science in these fields at unprecedented rates, posing thrilling possibilities for understanding some of the greatest cosmic mysteries.

The Brinson Prize Fellowship Program is administered as a collaboration between The Brinson Foundation and the Space Telescope Science Institute.