Tom Bakx

Cardiff University, Wales, United Kingdom. Supervisor: S. Eales

Catalogued the two hundred brightest, most distant Herschel-detected sources through completeness studies, gravitational lensing measures, redshift surveys & overdensity estimates.

• Conducted comprehensive spectroscopic redshift surveys of distant dusty galaxies with NOEMA Large Program (z-GAL, 250 hours, P.I.), ALMA (BEARS, 33 hours, Co.I.), ACA (210 hours, P.I.), IRAM 30m (170 hours, P.I.; Bakx et al. 2020a) in international collaborations
• High-resolution study of dusty galaxies in efficient ALMA observations (Bakx et al. 2024d)
• Identified overdensities by combining Gemini, SCUBA-2 and NOEMA (Bakx et al. 2024b)
• Revealed 3000 lenses in the Herschel fields with ALMA (Bakx et al. 2020a, 2024)

Delft University of Technology, Kavli Institute, Delft, Netherlands

Coordinated the design of the DESHIMA on-chip MKID instrument as lead scientific advisor between instrumentalists and astronomers, optimizing the instrument for future observations.

• Participated in three commissioning runs totaling over 2 months (Endo, Bakx et al. 2019)
• Organized and led a conference for 150 participants on Forensic Physics (student assoc.)
• Documented a novel ALMA set-up improving redshift surveys by 50% (Bakx et al. 2022)
• Collated the necessary receiver papers when using ALMA (Bakx & Conway 2024)

Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden. Host: K. Knudsen

Characterizing all dust emission studies z > 5 through stacking within the Wallenberg-funded study with chemists, stellar and galactic modellers to identify the origins of cosmic dust.

• First ALMA survey of a star-formation selected sample within the first billion years (Bakx et al. 2024c) that showed the extensive UV and sub-mm selection effects in z > 6 studies
• Organized a conference at Chalmers (“Dust, near and far”; part of LOC; 150 participants)
• Supervised course SEEX16 Bachelor Final Project, with direct supervision of five students

Nagoya University, Japan. Host: Y. Tamura

Explored the dust and gas in galaxies in the first billion years of the Universe as ALMA Fellow, including the submission of 65 P.I. observation proposals and 6 first-author papers.

• Identified the presence of warm dust and highly-ionized gas at z = 8 (Bakx et al. 2020c)
• First to use short-wavelength ALMA Band 9 observations to measure dust temperature in a z > 7 galaxy (Bakx et al. 2021)
• First ALMA follow-up proved a distant JWST galaxy is at a redshift of 12 (Bakx et al. 2023)
• Investigated the gas properties of Oxygen-bright z > 7 galaxies with JWST (RIOJA)
• Supervised two PhD students, resulting in Hagimoto et al. 2023 & Bakx et al. 2021

Compiling and guiding future development of ALMA in the next decades within a 250 person working group. Preparing white papers in preparation for the Expanding Horizon 2026 call. Leading the optimization of the configuration of >200 telescopes at the Atacama high-site.

• Guide development of NWO- (2.5 M€) and ERC-funded (3 M€) MKID instruments DESHIMA & TYFOON (Co.I. incl. three commissioning campaigns), heterodyne instrument FINER (Co.I.; 0.5 M€) and AtLAST telescope (Co.I.; 2x ERC-funded; 7.5 M€)
• Improved the efficiency of key ALMA science drivers, a five-time increase to detect spectral lines from galaxies (ANGELS; Bakx et al. 2024d), a graphical tool to identify redshifts and doubled the efficiency of redshift searches (Bakx et al. 2020b, 2023), as well as an overview of all receiver / technical papers of ALMA (Bakx et al. 2024e)