Dr. Christopher C. Hayward is a galaxy formation theorist who uses a variety of tools, including (magneto)hydrodynamical simulations, radiative transfer calculations, (semi-)analytic and semi-empirical models, and occasionally observations to advance our understanding of the physics of galaxy formation. Much of Dr. Hayward's work involves predicting synthetic observables via dust radiative transfer in order to directly compare simulations with observations, a technique that he has pioneered over the past ~15 years. He has worked on diverse topics, including stellar feedback, bursty star formation, infrared-selected galaxies, high-redshift galaxies, galaxy protoclusters, and obscured active galactic nuclei (AGN). He is a PI of the Feedback in Realistic Environments (FIRE) collaboration and a member of many observational collaborations, including SPT-SMG, COSMOS-Web, GOALS-JWST, ALPINE/ANDES, Halfway to the Peak, CHAMPS, and Beasts in the Bubbles.

One of Dr. Hayward's most important results is his prediction that contrary to the conventional wisdom, the submillimeter galaxy population is heterogeneous rather than dominated by merger-driven starbursts (Hayward et al. 2011, 2012, 2013a,b, 2021); copious evidence supporting this prediction has been obtained with ALMA and JWST. Another key work is his analytic model for how stellar feedback regulates star formation and drives outflows (Hayward & Hopkins 2017). Dr. Hayward has also shown that in highly obscured galaxies, AGN can dominate host galaxy-scale cold dust emission (McKinney, Hayward et al. 2021); the infrared luminosity can significantly overestimate the star formation rates of quenching and recently quenched galaxies (Hayward et al. 2014); and the bursty star formation that naturally arises due to the FIRE galaxy formation model yields an ultraviolet luminosity function that agrees with recent JWST observations of high-redshift galaxies (Sun, Faucher-Giguere, Hayward et al. 2023).