DAWN Summit 2026

3 Aug 2026, 09:00 → 5 Aug 2026, 23:30 Europe/Copenhagen

Peter Laursen (Cosmic Dawn Center)

Each year, new faces appear at DAWN, and you forget what your old colleagues are spending their time on. The purpose of the DAWN Summit is to get to know each other, scientifically and socially, get an overview of the science of DAWN, and hopefully spawn new collaborations.

Invited Reviews

• Anne Hutter: Reionization
• Chandana Hegde: Galaxy Evolution
• Yi Xu: First Stars & Galaxies
• Tom Reynolds: Transients
• Lise Christensen: The Interstellar Medium
• Po-Feng Wu: Quenching

 

Scientific Organizing Committee

Peter Laursen, Aayush Arya, Shuowen Jin, Tom Reynolds, Daniele Bjørn Malesani

 

Local Organizing Committee

Peter Laursen, Helena Baungaard-Sørensen, Mikkel Olsen

Monday 3 August

09:00 → 09:30 Break: Breakfast

09:30 → 09:45 Special Session: Opening Remarks

09:30 Opening Remarks

Speakers: Sune Toft (DAWN, NBI), Thomas Greve (DAWN, DTU)

09:45 → 10:55 Talks: First Stars and Galaxies - I

Regular session with invited and contributed talks

Convener: Emelie Burnham (Penn State U.)

09:45 Invited Review

Speaker: Yi Xu (DAWN, NBI)

10:15 Chemical signatures of pop III stars

Speaker: Clara Pollock (DAWN, NBI)

10:35 Exploring the first galaxies with JWST and upcoming facilities

Speaker: Pascal Oesch (U Geneva)

10:55 → 11:15 Break: Coffee

11:15 → 12:15 Talks: First Stars and Galaxies - II

Regular session with invited and contributed talks

Convener: Clara Pollock (Niels Bohr Institute)

11:15 High-redshift star formation under the cosmic microscope with SPT+ALMA+JWST

I will briefly summarize the legacy SPT-selected sample and its ALMA and JWST characterization, including measurements from CO, [CII], Hα, Paα, PAH, and water lines. The main focus of this talk will be new results from the third-generation SPT survey, including the latest source discoveries, improved selection enabled by SPT-3G, and what these new data reveal about the high-redshift dusty galaxy population.

Speaker: Joaquin Vieira (U. Illinois-Urbana Champaign)

11:35 TBD

Speaker: Kimi C. Kreilgaard (DAWN, NBI)

11:55 TBD

Speaker: Viola Gelli

12:15 → 14:15 Break: Lunch

14:15 → 15:25 Talks: Interstellar Medium

Regular session with invited and contributed talks

Convener: Dr Joris Witstok (Cosmic Dawn Center, University of Copenhagen)

14:15 Invited Review

Speaker: Lise Christensen (DAWN, NBI)

14:45 A neutral stance: Characterizing the neutral gas-phase of Gz9p3 in absorption and emission with JWST and ALMA

Speaker: Kasper Heintz (DAWN, DTU)

15:05 PAHs in cosmological simulations

I will present the first large-box cosmological simulation to self-consistently model the PAH properties of galaxies across cosmic time, coupling dust evolution physics with radiative transfer. I will discuss what drives the observed PAH-metallicity relation, and how well PAH emission traces the physical properties of galaxies. I will close with the implications for future far-infrared missions such as PRIMA.

Speaker: Desika Narayan (U Florida)

15:25 → 16:00 Break: Coffee

16:00 → 17:00 Special Session: AI in Astronomy Research

Convener: Marko Shuntov (DAWN, NBI)

Tuesday 4 August

09:00 → 09:30 Break: Breakfast

09:30 → 09:50 Special Session: Astronomy Career Guidance

Convener: Peter Laursen

09:50 → 10:40 Talks: Transients and heavy element production - I

Regular session with invited and contributed talks

Convener: Aayush Arya (Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen)

09:50 Invited Review: High redshift transients

Speaker: Tom Reynolds (Niels Bohr Institute)

10:20 Analysis of kilonovae and other interloping transients

Kilonovae are the only confirmed site of the r-process, the production pathway responsible for synthesising ~half of all elements heavier than iron. They are rare, and as such there are just two confirmed events. Here I will present my analysis of these objects, focusing on my best guesses for species identifications in their spectra. I will also present highlights from ongoing searches for new objects, which, while not uncovering any new kilonovae (yet!), have borne other interesting phenomena.

Speaker: James Gillanders (University of Oxford)

10:40 → 11:10 Break: Coffee

11:10 → 11:50 Talks: Transients and heavy element production - II

Regular session with invited and contributed talks

Convener: Alex Cameron (DAWN, NBI)

11:10 Heavy element production in colliding neutron stars: Confirmations via radiative transfer

Speaker: Aayush Arya (Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen)

11:30 Astrometric Quasar Selection

I will present the status of a couple of quasar surveys based on astrometric selection. We will conduct a large survey targeting about 300.000 sources using the ESO 4MOST spectrograph in the next 4-5 years. To prepare for this we have conducted a small pilot survey covering an area of 245 square degrees around the North Galactic Pole. In the presentation I will presents results from the latter survey and outline what we can expect from the former.

Speaker: Johan Fynbo (DAWN, NBI)

11:50 → 12:20 Talks: Galaxy Evolution Review

Regular session with invited and contributed talks

Convener: Rashmi Gottumukkala (Cosmic Dawn Centre, Niels Bohr Institute)

11:50 Invited Review: Galaxy Evolution

Speaker: Chandana Hegde (DAWN, DTU)

12:20 → 14:00 Break: Lunch

14:00 → 15:00 Talks: Galaxy Evolution - Stellar Populations, Metal Synthesis, Outflows

Regular session with invited and contributed talks

Convener: Rashmi Gottumukkala (Cosmic Dawn Centre, Niels Bohr Institute)

14:00 On the Hunt for Distant Super Star Clusters

Speaker: Will Jarvis (UMass Amherst)

14:20 Introducing E-SPS: An Accelerated SED Fitting Code Designed for Next-Generation Spectroscopic Surveys

Speaker: Emilie Burnham (Penn State U.)

14:40 Metal Synthesis and Ejection by Young Galaxies

Owing in significant measure to hard work by DAWN affiliates, JWST routinely pushes the frontier for detecting hydrogen and metals in emission and absorption to earlier times and lower masses. In parallel, theorists are discovering new physical implications for these observations. Motivated by observations of proximate damped Lyman-alpha absorbers and the galaxy mass-metallicity relation, I will present metal-loading and reionization as two factors whose role was under-appreciated prior to JWST's launch. I then introduce a novel statistical framework for matching metal absorbers to host galaxies that supports a qualitatively new level of realism and complexity as compared to previous efforts.

Speaker: Kristian Finlator (New Mexico State University)

15:00 → 15:45 Break: Coffee & Cake

15:45 → 16:55 Talks: Reionization

Regular session with invited and contributed talks

Convener: Will Jarvis (UMass Amherst)

15:45 Invited Review: Reionization

Speaker: Anne Hutter (University of Vienna)

16:15 TBD

Speaker: Koki Kakiichi (DAWN, NBI)

16:35 TBD

Speaker: Zuyi Chen (DAWN, NBI)

Wednesday 5 August

09:15 → 09:30 Break: Meet at Nyhavn

09:30 → 10:30 Transport: Boat to Hven

10:30 → 11:00 Transport: Walk to Stjerneborg

11:00 → 12:00 Excursion: Guided tour at Stjerneborg

12:00 → 12:30 Transport: Walk back to habour

12:30 → 13:30 Break: Lunch at Agnes Tapas

13:30 → 13:40 Transport: Return to sessions on the boat

13:40 → 14:50 Talks: Quenching

Regular session with invited and contributed talks

Convener: Minju Lee (DAWN, DTU)

13:40 Invited Review

Speaker: Po-Feng Wu (National Taiwan University)

14:10 Quenching and quiescence in the Early Universe with JWST

Speaker: William Baker

14:30 What Dust and Globular Clusters Reveal About Massive Galaxy Quenching

Massive quiescent galaxies at high redshift carry a fossil record of the physical processes that shut down their star formation. I will present highlights that leverage two complementary probes: the cold dust reservoirs of massive quiescent galaxies, and their globular cluster populations. New constraints on dust in strongly lensed quiescent galaxies show how quenching timescale imprints on the interstellar medium, with rapid shutdowns leaving galaxies dust-poor, while gradual quenching lets dust survive. Several of these unique laboratories also reveal new evidence for late-stage dust production from the poorly understood TP-AGB phase. With JWST, we can now also detect globular cluster systems around quiescent galaxies at high redshift, using their demographics to disentangle in-situ star formation from ex-situ assembly and to reconstruct star formation histories. Drawing on results from several papers in progress, I will place these findings in the broader context of massive galaxy quenching, highlighting open questions and what these complementary probes can teach us about quenching pathways in the early universe.

Speaker: Katherine Whitaker (UMass Amherst)

14:50 → 15:05 Talks: Flash Talks by DAWN-IRES Undergraduates

Regular session with invited and contributed talks

14:50 Exploring redshift evolution of line ratio diagnostics with JADES

Speaker: Mahitha Ramachandran (Yale University)

14:53 Multi- wavelength study on peculiar galaxies in the COSMOS field

Speaker: Alexander Poulin (Northeastern University)

14:56 TBD

Speaker: Maya Berhane (University of Washington)

15:00 Searching for first-generation star formation in the surroundings of massive galaxies in the early universe

Speaker: Lucas Zimmerman (Yale University)

15:02 An Extraordinary System in GOODS-S

Speaker: Andres Luengo (Yale University)

15:05 → 15:35 Break: Coffee & Discussion about the future of DAWN

15:35 → 17:00 Special Session: The future of DAWN

17:00 → 17:30 Transport: Tractor ride to Spirit of Hven

17:30 → 18:30 Excursion: Whiskey Tasting at Spirit of Hven

18:30 → 20:45 Break: Dinner at Spirit of Hven

21:00 → 21:30 Transport: Tractor ride to the ferry

21:30 → 22:30 Transport: Return from Hven to Copenhagen via ferry