Our research group in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College explores the origin and physical processes of supermassive black holes and other compact objects, and the cosmic evolution of black holes and galaxies.

group news

• 10 April 2026: Group member Dr. Jonathan Cohn has accepted a faculty position at Virginia Commonwealth University. Congratulations!
  
• 10 February 2026: The Roman Space Telescope High Latitude Wide Area Survey (for which Prof. Hickox was Co-Chair of the Definition Committe) was featured in a NASA news story.
  
• 5 March 2026: Group member Stephanie Podjed successfully defended her PhD thesis on Active Galactic Nuclei Across Scales: From Blazar Jets to Dark Matter Halos. Well done Dr. Podjed!
  
  
• 30 December 2025: Group alum Kelly Whalen (postdoc at GSFC) has published a paper on Limitations on Morphological Fitting for JWST “Little Red Dots”. Congrats!
  
• 1 December 2025: Our review article on What drives the growth of black holes: a decade of progress has now been published by New Astronomy Reviews.
  
• 13 August 2025: Group member Cassidy Metzger has published a paper on New TeV-emitting BL Lac candidates from the eROSITA X-ray survey in The Astrophysical Journal.
  
• 2 April 2025: Guarini Dean’s Postdoctoral Fellow Jonathan Cohn‘s paper on Evidence for evolutionary pathway-dependent black hole scaling relations has been accepted for publication in ApJ Letters.
  
• 19 February 2025: Group alum Rujuta Purohit’s ’24‘s paper on Lowest-Mass X-ray Selected AGN in the Boötes field has been accepted for publication in MNRAS. Congratulations!
  
  For more group news see the news archive.

research group and opportunities

I am an observational astrophysicist, with interests in active galactic nuclei, galaxy evolution, large-scale structure of the Universe, the cosmic X-ray background, and X-ray binary stars. My work uses data from the Chandra, XMM-Newton, Hubble, Spitzer, Herschel, and WISE space telescopes as well as ground-based optical, infrared, and radio observations.

I joined the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Dartmouth College in December 2011. My research is generously funded by the NSF, NASA, and previously by an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. My full CV is here. I am looking for interested and motivated students to take part in an exciting research program.