Guiding future deep-wide Roman surveys with galaxy formation physics we learn from JWST

NASA's Roman will redefine deep-field galaxy surveys with its field of view two orders of magnitude larger than Hubble and survey the distant universe at unprecedented scales. Designing effective and efficient Roman surveys relies heavily on our understanding of structure formation across cosmic time and simulated forecasts backed by physics. On the other hand, JWST is anticipated to transform our understanding of the emerging galaxy population in the earliest episodes of cosmic evolution. In this talk, I will use the “Semi-analytic forecasts for JWST” work series as an example to demonstrate how simulated galaxy catalogs and synthetic observations can enable a wide variety of preparatory studies and can be extremely useful in guiding survey designs. I will also discuss how semi-analytic models are essentially an aggregation of physical processes that we learn from observations and are the ideal tool for bridging state-of-the-art galaxy formation and supermassive black hole growth theory to the next generation observations