Lovell Lecture Series 2026

19.30 – 21.00

Almost every galaxy contains a supermassive black hole at its heart. Weighing billions of times that of the Sun, these black holes dominate at the centre of each galaxy, pulling in stars, gas and dust as they grow, but how did they get there? To answer this question, we must go back to back to the beginning of the universe.

Join us for this Lovell Lecture as Dr Rebecca Bowler presents cutting edge observations of the earliest supermassive black holes, revealing how these cosmic giants formed and grew in the early stages of the universe.

About Rebecca Bowler

Dr Rebecca Bowler is a senior lecturer studying the formation of galaxies after the Big Bang at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, University of Manchester. Previously, she was a research fellow at the University of Oxford and in 2021 she won the Henry Moseley medal and prize from the Institute of Physics for her “exceptional contributions to the observational study of the first galaxies in the Universe”. She works to understand how galaxies and supermassive black holes form and evolve using observations from telescopes around the world and in space, including with the James Webb Space Telescope.

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