David Elbaz

David Elbaz is a French observational astrophysicist specializing in galaxy formation and evolution.

He attended the École Nationale Supérieure de Physique (ENSPG) in Grenoble, where he obtained an engineering degree in 1990.

He is Research Director at the Commissariat à l'Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives (CEA-Saclay), where he has been a researcher in the Astrophysics Division (AIM) since 1994.

There, he was in charge of directing the "Cosmology and Evolution of Galaxies" laboratory for about a decade.

He completed his PhD in Astrophysics in 1994 at the Université Joseph Fourier in Grenoble with a thesis entitled "Origine du fer dans le milieu intra-amas et distribution du gaz X dans les amas de galaxies".

His supervisors were James Lequeux and Monique Arnaud.

Elbaz has supervised 14 postdoctoral researchers and 7 PhD students, two of whom received awards for their dissertations: H. Aussel (1999) and C. Schreiber (2015).

In 2001, using new data from the Infrared Space Observatory, Elbaz and Ranga Chary produced a suite of galaxy spectral energy distribution templates.

Along with the current knowledge of the galaxy redshift distribution, they were able to interpret the cosmic infrared background as being produced to at least 70% level from dust-enshrouded star formation in luminous infrared galaxies.

The advent of the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2003 enabled extremely deep observations in mid-infrared.

Elbaz and his collaborators analyzed observations from the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey and demonstrated that the star formation rate of individual galaxies increases due to environmental effects up to a critical galaxy density at redshift one, above which it decreases again, suggesting that galaxy evolution is not independent from structure formation at larger scales in the universe.

Five years later, using deep far infrared observations from the Herschel Space Observatory, Elbaz led a study that revealed that most galaxies across cosmic time form stars in two main modes: one placing them in the "main sequence", where their star formation rate correlates tightly with their stellar mass, and the other where the galaxies are more compact and form stars more efficiently departing from this correlation.

). More recently, using observations from ALMA, his group discovered a dominant population of optically invisible massive galaxies in the early Universe.

Elbaz has received several awards, including:

Elbaz's contributions to the international astrophysics' community include:

Elbaz is active in public outreach activities and has been interviewed regularly on various topics of modern astrophysics by French media, including "Le Monde", "France Culture", "Sciences et Avenir", and "France Inter".

Among his presentations are "Is the Universe an illusion?"

(French: L’Univers est-il une illusion ), "Do we live in a black hole?"

In 2005, he was awarded an habilitation from the Paris-Sud University.

He has been teaching the Galaxy Evolution course in the Masters program entitled Recherche Astronomie, Astrophysique et Ingénierie Spatiale de Paris since 2005.

Elbaz has made contributions in observational extragalactic astrophysics through space infrared and submillimeter observations.

He has been recognized as an ISI Highly Cited researcher by Clarivate Analytics.

He has been the managing editor of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics since 2018.

Elbaz's grandparents moved to France from Morocco at the beginning of the 20th century.

He was born and raised in the Paris area.

(French: Habitons-nous dans un trou noir ? ) and "In search of the killer of galaxies" (French: A la recherche du tueur de galaxies ) that was presented at the Conférence Cyclope in February 2020.

Elbaz has written the scenarios and participated in shows that involve science and art that have been presented in various theaters in France., including:

Elbaz has authored several popular science books: