With modern facilities working at a large range of wavelengths, and data gathered in large surveys combined with state-of-the-art advances in theory and modeling, we are developing a comprehensive picture of the formation, evolution, and present-day characteristics of galaxies. Much of the department's observational work on this problem has been carried out in the context of surveys. We have played a leadership role in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (link is external), and have used the data to explore and characterize the properties and environments of galaxies and their evironments in the present-day Universe (Greene, Gunn, Lupton, Strauss) from their photometric and spectroscopic properties as well as weak lensing to learn about their masses. We are using data from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (link is external) to study the properties and evolution of galaxies, and spectroscopy with the Subaru Prime Focus Spectrograph will allow us to determine precise redshifts and study their physical properties in detail. Clusters of galaxies are both fascinating astrophysical laboratories in their own right and powerful probes of cosmology (Bahcall, Gunn, Strauss). The most massive galaxies in the universe are particularly important probes of galaxy evolution, the MASSIVE survey is designed to study their supermassive black holes, dark matter halos, and stellar populations (Greene).