Welcome!

I am a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. I will be moving to the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) at the University of Hawaiʻi in the summer of 2026 as a tenure-track Assistant Professor. I am excited to hear from prospective students and postdocs interested in joining my group.

I study the first stars, galaxies, and black holes that formed immediately after the Big Bang. I am a regular user of the JWST observatory via several PI and co-I programs. These programs are uncovering entirely new classes of astrophysical objects such as “Little Red Dots” and “Black Hole Stars” that are reshaping our story of the early Universe. They are revealing how the first galaxies emerged to light up the Universe, ionize the intergalactic oceans of hydrogen, and synthesize the elements that would one day seed life on Earth (see for e.g., our team’s discovery of MoM-z14 a mere 280 million years after the Big Bang).

Before MIT, I spent five happy years at Harvard where I received my PhD in Astronomy, advised by Prof. Charlie Conroy, in May 2022. My thesis focused on unearthing some of the first galaxies that lie buried within our own Milky Way (“Galactic Archaeology”). I sought these ancient immigrant systems using the Gaia satellite and large ground-based spectroscopic surveys (e.g., the H3 Survey, the 100k Survey).

I grew up in Hyderabad, India (for a recent review, see). In a Bollywood-esque plot twist, at age 18 I dropped out of engineering school, bought my first-ever plane ticket, and joined the founding class of 150 students at Yale-NUS College, Singapore (“Asia’s first liberal arts college”). Amidst my many Yale-NUS adventures, I discovered the joys of Astronomy working with Prof. Charles Bailyn, and as an exchange student with Dr. Iva Momcheva and Prof. Pascal Oesch in the van Dokkum group at Yale.

My name is pronounced Rohan (rho, like the Greek letter + hon, like short for “honey”) Naidu (Nye, like Bill Nye the Science Guy + Doo, like Scooby-Doo).