TP-AGB stars are a short-lived phase of stellar evolution near the end of a star's fusion lifetime. While these stars represent negligible stellar mass within a galaxy, they can comprise large fractions of the near-infrared light. I am using HST and adaptive optics images to constrain the IR luminosities of TP-AGB stars.

A simple optical to mid-IR color cut of R - [24] > 14 selects for extremely dust obscured galaxies (DOGs) at z=2. These rare objects are ultra-luminous infrared galaxies powered by a combination of star formation and AGN activity. They may be today's massive ellipticals seen at the time of their stellar assembly. I use Keck Adaptive Optics to study the rest-frame optical to near-IR morphologies of DOGs. Given their energetics, they are surprisingly normal looking galaxies.

CATS used Keck Laser Guide Star adaptive optics to image a large sample ofover 300 galaxies in the early Universe at rest-frame near-infrared wavelengths. The primary goal of this legacy program is to track the assembly of galaxies like our own Milky Way through their history of star formation. The near-IR AO observations are 4x the resolution of Hubble Space Telescope in the near-IR. The resolution of these images will not be exceeded until the advent of larger (20-30m class) telescopes with AO planned for the coming decade. By observing in the GOODS, GEMS and EGS fields, the scientific value of the AO data is highly leveraged by the complementary high spatial resolution optical HST images.

We used the excellent multi-mavelength data in the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey to track the optical and infrared evolution of galaxies since z=1. We found evidence for size dependent luminosity evolution among blue galaxies. This corresponds to a dimming of ~1.6 magnitudes since z=1 for galaxies with half-light radii larger than 2.5 kpc, and can be explained by a simple exponential decline in the star formation rate. These results match well to star formation rate indicators from MIPS in the mid infrared. The MIPS data show a rapidly evolving population of luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs) with very high star formation rates. Above z=0.5 LIRGs become relatively common and are primarily spiral galaxies. Below z=0.5 LIRGs are rare and become dominated by objects with peculiar or merger type morphology.

The KPNO International Spectroscopic Survey (KISS) is a wide field objective prism survey which utilizes the KPNO Burrell Schmidt telescope with a 2048 x 2048 CCD detector. The survey detects strong-lined emission line galaxies (ELGs) with continuum magnitudes down to B = 20 and redshifts out to z = 0.1. KISS extends previous objective prism surveys by going 2-3 magnitudes deeper, yet still covering a large area on the sky. I measured metal abundances of the ELGs from follow-up spectra using both strong line and nebular abundance methods.