Rate My Professor Eiichi Egami

Eiichi Egami is a Research Professor at Steward Observatory, University of Arizona, and a member of the Graduate Faculty. He earned his Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa in 1995, with a thesis entitled "A deep survey of fields around z > 4 quasars," advised by Esther Ming Hu. Egami's research centers on extragalactic astronomy, emphasizing ground- and space-based infrared and submillimeter observations. His current interests encompass galaxies in the reionization era at redshifts exceeding 6, infrared-luminous galaxies at high redshift and locally, cluster galaxy evolution and cooling flows, and the use of massive galaxy clusters as gravitational lenses to study the distant universe. He has supervised three doctoral students and was honored as a Kavli Visiting Scholar at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University.

Egami has contributed substantially to flagship astronomical missions and surveys. As a member of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) NIRCam instrument team, he leads the SAPPHIRES program, which received 600 hours of Cycle 3 parallel observation time to hunt for high-redshift luminous objects. He previously served as Principal Investigator for the Herschel Lensing Survey (292 hours) and participated in Spitzer Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS) science, particularly on lensing clusters. Notable studies include analyses of the Hubble Frontier Fields cluster Abell 2744, uncovering its extraordinary substructure and star formation in massive mergers. Key publications feature "The first Frontier Fields cluster: 4.5 μm excess in a z ∼ 8 galaxy candidate in Abell 2744" (Laporte et al., 2014, A&A), "Star formation in the massive cluster merger Abell 2744" (Rawle et al., 2014, MNRAS), "Probing the z > 6 Universe with the First Hubble Frontier Fields Cluster A2744" (Atek et al., 2014, ApJ), and recent JWST works such as photometric detection of a galaxy beyond redshift 14 (Egami et al., 2024). His 337 research works have accumulated over 22,000 citations, advancing understanding of galaxy formation, evolution, and cosmic reionization.