54th Saas Fee Advanced Course 2025

Understanding how the first galaxies and black holes formed and evolved is one of the major topics of research in modern astrophysics. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), operational since summer 2022, is revolutionizing the field by providing access to galaxies at an early cosmic epoch, when the Universe was only a few hundred million years old, and by probing galaxy properties at much improved sensitivity. Large observational and theoretical efforts are ongoing to understand the emergence of the first galaxies and black holes, with new and surprising discoveries announced on a monthly basis. This Saas-Fee Advanced Course will provide the opportunity for early career researchers to get a comprehensive view of our knowledge of the early Universe after two years of JWST. The program includes a series of lectures by distinguished lectures who will put the recent JWST results in the context of decades of astronomical research into the First Billion Years.

Formal lectures will be complemented by poster presentations and coffee+poster sessions, as well as interactive peer-learning sessions, where the participants will have the opportunity to learn best practices with observational and simulated JWST data. A several-hour-long afternoon break is scheduled, when the participants are encouraged to do winter sports or simply interact with each other.