Third-year Applied Physics student Joakim Carlsen wins the prize for best poster and project, entitled ‘Detecting Massive Galaxies at High Redshift Using the Dark Energy Survey’ carried out at the ICG supervised by Dr Daniel Thomas. The project was a great team effort with ICG researchers Xan Morice-Atkinson, Dr Diego Capozzi, and James Etherington contributing to the project. In his project, Joakim is looking for candidates of very massive galaxies in the early universe around redshifts 4-6 in the Dark Energy Survey data. This search for ‘a needle in the haystack’ led to a few very promising objects that will now need to be confirmed through follow-up spectroscopy. If true, the sheer presence of massive galaxies in the early universe would be challenging our current understanding of galaxy formation.