Over the past two decades thousands of planets with an extraordinary diversity of properties have been discovered orbiting nearby stars. Many of these exoplanetary systems challenge our narrative for how planets form and evolve, motivating the search for observational clues to the underlying mechanisms that led to this diversity. In this talk I will describe my work using a wide range of observational techniques to uncover these underlying mechanisms. I will constrain the physics of gas giant formation and evolution by discerning population statistics, system architectures, rotation rates, and atmospheric compositions of gas giant planets. I will then discuss the impact that outer gas giants have on the inner architectures of planetary systems by exploring differences in inner planet masses, separations, multiplicities, and orbital properties. Finally, I will highlight the key role that next generation instruments and telescopes such as the GMT/TMT will play by extending these novel observations to entirely new classes of planets.

The discovery of a high-redshift submillimeter-bright (dusty) galaxies population has revolutionized our understanding of galaxy evolution and star formation in extreme conditions, yet their nature remains hotly debated. Recent wide-area extragalactic surveys at submm/mm bands have discovered hundreds of such galaxies that are strongly lensed at high redshifts. The boosted angular resolution and brightness open new exciting opportunities for studying the interstellar medium within. We have thus carefully selected a sample of the bright lensed dusty galaxies based on the Herschel-ATLAS sample. Through observations of the multiple transitions of the CO lines, we analyzed the physical conditions of the molecular gas. Additionally, we have also conducted the first multi-transition H2O line survey within these high-redshift galaxies. We have studied the properties of the far-infrared radiation fields with the H2O lines. The study provides us new constraints of the warm dense, extreme dust-obscured regions. ALMA 0".2-0".4 follow-up of one of the brightest sources (G09v1.97) in our sample shows very well agreement of the spatial distribution and kinematics between the CO, H2O, and H2O+ lines. Interestingly, this merger source shows a mismatch between the cold-dust continuum peak and the peak of the line emissions, suggesting a significant amount of cold gas is in the interacting region, similar to the local merger prototype, the Antennae galaxies. In parallel, we have conducted a line survey in Band 3 and 4 using ALMA, which resulted in detections of a rich series of molecules including HCN, HNC, HCO+, CCH, 13CO, C18O, CS, N2H+, and isotopologues of CO. The rich detections of molecules in multiple transitions enable us, for the first time, to have a detailed view of the astrochemical process and reveal rich information about the high-redshift physical properties of the molecular gas, the radiation field, and their interactions.

We present several N-body simulations of disk galaxy with mass evolution model to study the influence of mass accretion on the bar formation and evolution. Using techniques of orbit family recognition and harmonic decomposition, we find that the formation of the bar is always accompanied by the formation of a stellar cusp, which may correspond to the bulge in the disk. As the mass growth of the cusp, it destroys the bar, which indicates that bar is not always long-lived and stable structure. We also find that the strength of bar and the time to form the bar depend on the mass accretion rate and the accretion radius.

Planets are assembled from the gas and dust in the disks orbiting around young stars. How these disks evolve from primordial gas and dust into planetary systems like our own solar system is still not well understood. With the powerful Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), we are now able to study the planet-forming-disks in greater detail and towards larger samples. These observations are transforming our view of disks and offering new insights in planet formation. In this talk, I will share results from ALMA disk surveys, which reveal the general disk properties including masses and sizes, and the detailed dust grain distributions. The implications of the assembly and early evolution of planetary systems will be discussed based on these results.

Abstract: I present evidence for a diversity of pathways for building up the quiescent galaxy population at early cosmic times. Specifically, I will present observational constraints on star-formation histories and quenching timescales by combining Keck DEIMOS spectroscopic data with >10-band photometry. I will discuss how one can self-consistently fit both photometric and spectroscopic data together with the tool Prospector, which allows fitting for non-parametric star-formation histories and complex stellar, nebular, and dust physics. Although the apparent diversity, we find that the most massive, compact galaxies have formed their stars the earliest and most rapidly. Finally, I will relate these findings to numerical simulations (in particular IllustrisTNG), putting forward that most galaxies not change their morphology significantly during quenching.

TolTEC is a new camera that will be mounted on the Large Millimeter Telescope (LMT). Once there, it will provide simultaneous, polarization-sensitive imaging at 2.0, 1.4, and 1.1mm wavelengths through its ~7000 Lumped Element Kinetic Inductance Detectors (LeKIDs). The TolTEC data analysis software stack (TolTECA) is developed to facilitate all the data related tasks including instrument diagnosing, data reduction, data product management, and visualization. TolTECA is used both at the observing time to provide the quasi real-time feedback ("quick look") for the observer, and at later times at the data analysis facilities (high performance clusters) to produce science-ready data products. Moreover, it provides a web-based solution to host interactive science-oriented services like S/N calculators, observation simulators, and SZ effect simulators - all designed to facilitate the exploration of the science cases enabled by TolTEC. The two key components of TolTECA are the Python package tolteca, and the highly optimized data reduction engine citlali written in C++. Tolteca implements the general data management and handling submodules that serve at the highest levels, while citlali is the high performance data reduction engine that carries out the the time-ordered data (TOD) reduction and mapmaking. In this talk, I will first cover the overall architecture of TolTECA, and then describe some of its more novel components in detail, which includes the LeKIDs data modeling, the highly configurable parallelization framework that we used in citlali, as well as the tolteca data analysis workflow and data product management. The second part of the talk will focus on some of our on-going efforts in using simulations to explore the science cases that are enabled by TolTEC.

High-mass stars are key to regulating the interstellar medium, star formation activity, and overall evolution of galaxies, but their formation remains an open problem in astrophysics. Current theories of star formation disagree on the timing, initial masses of dense cloud-cores, and the role of gravity versus turbulence during the nascent phases of star cluster evolution. These long-standing uncertainties are now being addressed with the statistical power of multi-wavelength Galactic Plane surveys and the unprecedented sensitivity of ALMA. In this talk I shall review current surveys of the dense, star-forming gas of the Milky Way and discuss studies we have carried out to understand the physical conditions during the earliest phases of high-mass star formation. I shall further describe a novel Bayesian analysis framework to process large gas-kinematic surveys and discuss the results of an application to nearby clouds. In closing, I shall discuss how the wide-field capabilities of both current and next-generation cm/mm-wavelength facilities, such as the LMT, GBT, ALMA, and J/ngVLA, will expand our understanding of star formation in the Milky Way.