Until recently, astronomers have only been able to study galaxies closest to the Milky Way in any detail, but the new James Webb Space Telescope will allow astronomers to observe some of the most distant galaxies in the Universe for the first time. Dr. Allison Strom will discuss her plans to use JWST and its suite of powerful infrared instruments to determine the chemical DNA of these faraway galaxies and show how this information is answering key questions about how galaxies like our own formed and evolved.

Allison Strom is a Carnegie-Princeton Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University in New Jersey. She received a PhD in astrophysics from the California Institute of Technology in 2017, an MPhil in astronomy from the University of Cambridge in 2011, and a BS in physics and astronomy from the University of Arizona in 2010. One of the primary goals of her research is to understand the origin of mature galaxies like our own Milky Way, which has been a longstanding open question in astronomy. Throughout her career, Allison has used some of the world's largest telescopes to address this issue, leveraging their enormous technological power to observe "adolescent" galaxies in the very distant universe.