The lecture will address outstanding key questions, including why stars start and stop forming in galaxies, how galaxies participate in their larger cosmic environments, how the breathtaking variety in galactic structures (spiral disks, spheroids, irregulars) originates, the ongoing relationship between galaxies and the supermassive black holes that live at their centers, and the nature of the very first galaxies in the early Universe.

Recently, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revolutionized our ability to answer these questions with direct measurements of galaxies observed as they existed over 13 billion years ago. In particular, researchers have gained unprecedented insights into galaxies in the very early universe by analyzing not only their images but also their spectra. These breathtaking new data provide essential clues about the origin of many key chemical elements such as oxygen and nitrogen, which, in turn, reveal the workings of the galaxy formation process itself.