Erik Zackrisson

Natural Sciences Fellow, SCAS.
Associate Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy, Uppsala University

Erik Zackrisson is an Associate Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy and a Distinguished University
Teacher at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Uppsala University. He received his Ph.D.
in Astronomy from Uppsala University in 2005, has held positions as a postdoctoral researcher at Uni-
versity of Turku, as Assistant Professor and Senior Researcher at Stockholm University, and received
the title of Docent in Astronomy from Stockholm University in 2009.

Zackrisson conducts research on the first generations of stars, galaxies, and black holes that formed in
the early Universe. However, he is also involved in studies of the conditions for life on cosmological scales
and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He holds leadership positions within research teams associated
with the next-generation telescopes, the Square Kilometer Array and the Extremely Large Telescope, and is
the leader of Project Hephaistos, the largest search to date for artificial megastructures, known as Dyson
spheres in the Milky Way galaxy. He has been part of several record-breaking discoveries of stars and galaxies
in the early Universe (e.g., Inoue et al. Science, 2016; Hashimoto et al. Nature, 2018; Welsh et al. Nature, 2022)
and has led the work on a suite of numerical models for the observational signatures of primordial stars and
galaxies (e.g., Zackrisson et al. Astrophysical Journal, 2011, 2013, 2017).

During his time as a Fellow at SCAS, Zackrisson will explore the role of anthropic reasoning in the search for
extra-terrestrial intelligence, i.e., to what extent our own position in space and time can be used to inform search
strategies in the quest to detect extraterrestrial life.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2023-24.