Cake Talk by Olivia Cooper
The epoch between reionization and the peak of cosmic star formation (z~3-8) encompasses an important growth phase of the Universe as it transitions from being interstellar medium dominated to stellar mass dominated. In between, galaxies and large-scale structures are dramatically and seemingly rapidly evolving -- recent discoveries of extreme systems at redshifts higher than expected challenge our current models. To understand how rapidly the Universe assembled in the first two billion years and the role of massive galaxies in this evolution, we utilize observations spanning wavelengths and galaxy types, implementing clean identification techniques to break degeneracies and build statistical samples of massive galaxies. Here, I summarize my ongoing work within three observational programs: Searching Far and Long, an ALMA 2mm follow up of submm-bright dusty star-forming galaxies; the Web Epoch of Reionization Lyman-alpha Survey (WERLS), a Keck spectroscopic census of Lyman-alpha from UV-bright EoR candidates; and COSMOS-Web, the largest JWST legacy imaging survey. Within these programs, I center on observational efforts to efficiently select and take census of bright and early massive galaxies in order to understand their growth and evolution through this critical epoch.