Conference: From Stars to Galaxies - Connecting our Understanding of Star and Galaxy Formation; April 2010; Gainesville, Florida

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This award will provide travel grants for graduate students and invited speakers to participate in the international conference "From Stars to Galaxies - Connecting our Understanding of Star and Galaxy Formation", to be hosted by the University of Florida (UF) in Gainesville, Florida on April 7 - 10, 2010. The goal of this conference is to bring together researchers from the often separate star and galaxy formation communities to share recent research results and help motivate future projects to improve our understanding of these processes. The meeting comes at a time when many exciting results are appearing from large, high resolution surveys of our Galaxy's star-forming regions. Properties of individual stars and protostars can be determined to build up an accurate census of the star formation activity in entire giant molecular clouds (GMCs) and GMC populations, thus probing the questions: what drives star formation and how does it proceed in different environments such as the local solar neighborhood, dense stellar clusters, and the Galactic center region? At the same time a large number of nearby galaxies have now had their star formation activity and gas content resolved down to sub-kiloparsec scales, providing a wealth of information to test theories of star formation on these larger scales. With increasing computational resources, theoretical and numerical models are catching up to try to explain these observations.As a part of the conference program, there will be a public event, "Starry Night: Building the Galaxies" to be held at the Florida Museum of Natural History on the UF campus, featuring a few public lectures by selected conference participants, star viewing, and planetarium tours. This event will follow the same format as the successful Starry Night events organized previously by Dr. Jonathan Tan (UF) and his collaborators, involving the Florida Museum of Natural History, the Museum Nights student organization and the Alachua Astronomy Club, with attendances surpassing 600 people, including many school children. In addition, the presentations of the conference speakers will be posted on the conference web site, which will provide a valuable electronic resource for the attendees and other astrophysicists unable to attend the meeting in person.