The James Webb Space Telescope is the culmination of thirty years of planning, twenty years of construction, and eleven billion dollars of funding. It is the most expensive and complex astronomical observatory ever built and it was designed specifically to perform the first systematic exploration of stars, galaxies, and black holes in the early universe. Luckily for us, this first systematic exploration is happening right now --- in our lives. I will introduce this flagship telescope and discuss some of the early, stunning, and sometimes tentative, discoveries we have made in Webb's first deep fields, by measuring the ancient first light from galaxies and black holes originating near the edge of the observable universe. I will in particular discuss the new, mysterious, very bright, and seemingly impossible objects at the edge of the universe which have been puzzling all of us: "little red dots".

Joel Leja is the Dr. Keiko Miwa Ross Mid Career Endowed Faculty Chair and an Associate Professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University. He researches how galaxies like the Milky Way form over cosmic time, using ground-and space-based telescopes, large cosmic surveys, and supercomputers. He specializes in modeling observations of distant galaxies and in data-intensive methodologies applied to astrophysics, including modeling individual galaxies (e.g., Prospector) and galaxy population modeling (mass function, star-forming sequence, and other scaling relationships). Joel received his Ph.D in Astronomy from Yale University under Dr. Pieter van Dokkum in 2016 and was an NSF Astronomy & Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian with Dr. Charlie Conroy until 2020. He was named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher in 2023, 2024, and 2025 (top 1% of cited researchers in astrophysics), and awarded Yale University's Brouwer Prize in 2019 for a PhD thesis of unusual merit.