Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) grow by accreting matter in a phase where they are observed as active galactic nuclei (AGN). In order to track the evolution of rare objects, such as AGN at high luminosity, which signal when the majority of black hole growth occurred, a large volume of the Universe has to be explored through wide area surveys. Until recently, no large area X-ray survey has existed, meaning that a key phase in SMBH growth and SMBH/galaxy co-evolution is missing: luminous obscured SMBH growth. To rectify this gap, I have begun a wide area X-ray survey in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey region Stripe 82 which contains a veritable treasure trove of multi-wavelength coverage, expediting follow-up of identified X-ray sources. In this talk, I will review the highlights of our first release of "Stripe 82X" which covers ~16.5 deg^2 with ~3300 X-ray sources identified. I will discuss our current ground-based follow-up campaigns to target interesting classes of AGN and will comment on what we expect to learn with the addition of 20 deg^2 awarded to our team in the current XMM-Newton observing cycle.

What started as a trickle in the mid 1990’s is now a torrent, with over one thousand extrasolar planets currently known, and thousands of candidates awaiting confirmation. The study of exoplanets has already revolutionized our view of planet formation, and will soon do the same to our understanding of planetary atmospheres and interiors. Since we view them from the top-down, one of the first aspects of exoplanet atmospheres to be constrained is their thermal emission. By combining infrared emission measurements at a variety of orbital phases, we can infer a planet's Bond albedo, the efficiency of its day-night heat transport, and, in the case of planets subject to eccentricity seasons, its thermal inertia. Multi-wavelength emission measurements can also constrain a planetary atmosphere's composition and vertical temperature structure. Such inferences are particularly sensitive to the uncertainty in emission measurements, however, and the accuracy of eclipse measurements has typically been over-stated. Fortunately, improved analysis techniques and next-generation instruments should allow us to resolve outstanding questions about hot Jupiters, and to extend our methods to temperate terrestrial planets.

Dwarf galaxies are a frontier for new discoveries in both galaxy formation and cosmology. I discuss work centered around connecting LCDM and its predictions to observations of dwarf galaxies at three different scales of "dwarf". I will discuss the Milky Way's satellites and both solutions and lingering troubles with their abundances and scalings. The strangest of these puzzles manifest in the bright dSphs, which seem to be under-dense relative to LCDM expectations. With this in mind, I describe results from a large spectroscopic survey of M31's dSph satellites searching for signs of similar puzzles. Finally, I describe searches for comparable satellites beyond the Local Group, and compare their abundances and properties to straightforward LCDM expectations.

As galaxies grow and evolve, they go through a violent phase of their evolution where intense star formation drives outflows. I will examine this phase using cosmological galaxy formation simulations. The simulations show that starbursts and outflows have implications for many observed properties of galaxies including their gaseous halos, morphology, potential, and star formation history.

Even the greatest scientists have made some serious blunders. "Brilliant Blunders" concerns the evolution of life on Earth, of the Earth itself, of stars, and of the universe as a whole. In this talk, I shall concentrate on and analyze major errors committed by such luminaries as Charles Darwin, Linus Pauling, and Albert Einstein. I will also scrutinize the various types of blunders and attempt to identify their causes. Most importantly, however, I'll argue that blunders are not only inevitable, ­but rather part and parcel of progress in science and other creative enterprises.

The search for exoplanets is motivated by the question of whether life exists elsewhere. This drives our interest in the detection of planets that are similar to our own world: rocky planets with the potential for liquid surface water and plate tectonics; worlds that might harbor life that we can recognize. Importantly, we will need to discover not just a few, but hundreds of these worlds to eventually gain a statistical understanding of whether life is rare, common, or ubiquitous and ground-based telescopes offer an ideal platform for carrying out decade-long surveys. It is critical for follow-up studies (imaging, atmospheric studies) that these planets orbit nearby stars. In this talk, I will discuss how we plan to take what we've learned and push on to the next frontier: our plans for a next generation spectrograph, EXPRES, to carry out a search 100 Earths with the Discovery Channel Telescope.

A fundamental role is attributed to supermassive black holes (SMBH) and the feedback they generate in the evolution of galaxies. Cosmologial models that do not consider these feedback effects end up producing over-massive galaxies. I will present and discuss astronomical observations of feeding and feedback processes around SMBHs that occur when the SMBH is being fed in Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). These observations comprise optical and near-infrared Integral Field Spectroscopy of the inner few hundred parsecs of nearby AGN host galaxies, and are intended to provide constraints to the feeding and feedback processes. I will discuss in particular results obtained by my group that reveal gas inflows along nuclear spirals and disks. The inflow rates are much larger than the AGN accretion rate, suggesting that the excess gas is depleted via formation of new stars that are indeed observed in many casas and can be interpreted as signatures of co-evolution of the host galaxy and its AGN. Gas outflows are prevalent among the highest luminosity AGN, with velocities ranging from a few up to ~1000 km/s and mass outflow rates of a few solar masses per year.

The WFC3 Infrared Spectroscopic Parallel Survey (WISP) is a large ( ~1000 orbits) HST program that uses WFC3 slitless spectroscopy to detect thousands of galaxies across a wide redshift range 0.3 < z < 2.3. I will present an overview of recent results on emission line galaxies, including a statistical determination of their dust extinction properties, the discovery of a new population of extremely strong emission-line dwarf galaxies, and the implication of the observed number counts for the EUCLID mission. I will also discuss the properties of passive galaxies at z∼1.5 derived from the combination of the WISP spectra with broad-band photometry from HST-UVIS and Spitzer images.

Determining the global properties of the Milky Way presents unique challenges, primarily due to our position embedded within its disk. As a result our knowledge of many basic properties of the Galaxy, including itscolor and luminosity, has remained limited. In this talk, I will describe how we have developed improved determinations of the total stellar mass (M) and star formation rate (SFR) of the Milky Way using Hierarchical Bayesian statistical techniques. We then use the results, in combination with data from SDSS, to better determine the Galaxy's luminosity and integrated color. We exploit the close relationship between galaxies' photometric properties and their total stellar mass and star formation rate. We thus select a sample of Milky Way analog galaxies designed to match the best Galactic M and SFR measurements, including measurement uncertainties. Applying the Copernican assumption that the Milky Way should not be special amongst galaxies of similar properties, the color and luminosity distribution of these Galactic analogs then constrains the properties of our own Galaxy much more tightly than previous measurements. In the remaining time, I will describe the next steps in large spectroscopic surveys of the distant universe. I will provide an overview of the eBOSS project, a component of the next-generation SDSS-IV survey beginning observations this summer; eBOSS will obtain redshifts of ~650,000 galaxies and ~850,000 QSOs at 0.6 < z < 3.5 in order to study dark energy via the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) technique. I will also describe plans for DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which may be used for a survey of >20 million galaxies and QSOs, placing strong constraints on dark energy models via BAO early in the next decade.

I will provide an update on the status of the Large Millimeter Telescope. The LMT has begun a second season of "Early Science" observations with its new active surface system in place. The telescope and instruments are working well, and our understanding of the system and its performance have improved greatly over the past year. All in all, things are in good shape, and we have a millimeter-wave telescope that is very competitive with the world's other large millimeter-wave single dish telescopes. I will review the technical performance of the LMT and present some examples of scientific data obtained with the telescope. Then we will turn our attention to the future and present an overview of the completion plan for the full 50m telescope. Finally we will consider the long term future of LMT Observatory and the participation of astronomers from UMass and the US community in this endeavor.

It has been long predicted from numerical simulations that a major merger of two disk galaxies results in a formation of the spheroid-dominated early-type galaxy. Contrary to this classical scenario of galaxy merger evolution, recent simulations with more realistic gas physics have shown that not all of the major mergers will become an early-type galaxy, but some will reemerge as a disk dominated late-type galaxy. In order to check this scenario and look for observational evidence of a forming molecular disk, we investigate new and archival interferometric CO maps of 37 optically selected merger remnants in the local universe. The new maps are obtained toward 27 sources with ALMA, CARMA, and SMA. We find that 65 % (24/37) of the sample show kinematical signatures of the molecular gas disk in their velocity fields. However, the majority of the merger remnants except for a few shows a compact molecular gas disk relative to the stellar spheroidal component. Unless the disks grow significantly, for example from the return of ejected molecular gas or tidal HI gas, the majority will likely evolve into spheroid dominated early-type galaxies. We tentatively suggest that a few sources with extended gas disks may evolve into disk dominated late-type galaxies, if there are no further mechanism to transport the molecular gas toward the central region.

The last decade of Mars exploration with orbiters and rovers has revealed that liquid water was common during the first billion years of the planet's history with diverse aqueous, potentially habitable environments varying in space and time. Curiosity's landing in 2012 provides the opportunity to explore one set of these environments up-close: sedimentary deposits in 150-km Gale Crater. The 10-instrument suite on Curiosity is the most advanced sent to a planetary surface to date, and results from the first year and a half of exploration will be described, along with a look ahead to the coming years as Curiosity's trek continues.

The availability of new instruments and telescopes is making it possible to study large, well-selected samples of nearby galaxies at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths. These observations trace the cold, dense gas and dust which is the fuel for star formation. I will discuss new results from the Herschel Space Observatory from the Very Nearby Galaxies Survey, which aims to observe the closest example of each major class of galaxy with all the photometric and spectroscopic modes that Herschel has available. Our results include evidence for the primary heating source of much of the dust emission in normal galaxies, an increase in the gas to dust ratio in the vicinity of the central engine in Centaurus A, and a component of very hot molecular gas seen via high frequency CO emission lines that dominates the CO luminosity of starburst and merging galaxies.

Debris disks are dusty, gas-poor disks around young stars, generated by collisions between parent bodies and/or sublimation of comets. The Spitzer Space Telescope has enabled photometric searches and detailed spectroscopic studies of thermal emission from dust in hundreds of debris disks at mid- to far-infrared wavelengths. These observations allow us: (1) to infer the spatial structure of dust in individual systems and determine how the dust grains are removed; (2) to measure the disk fraction (in young associations and moving groups) as a function of age to constrain the mechanism that triggers collisions; and (3) to place constraints on the mass of circumstellar molecular hydrogen and therefore models for giant planet formation. In this talk, I will discuss the spatial structure and removal mechanisms of dust in debris disks, and constraints on the models for the formation of gas giants and the late-stages of solar system evolution. I will also describe outstanding questions about debris disk evolution that will be addressed using future ground- and space-based instruments.