We introduce the The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Chemical Abundances of Stars in the Halo (CASH) Project. This University of Texas Long Term Project aims at discovering metal-poor Galactic halo stars selected from various surveys. We present the results of the first year of HET observations: Thus far, 200 objects are observed with the high-resolution

We present the first detailed abundance analysis of the metal-poor giant HK-II 17435-00532. This star was observed as part of the University of Texas Long-Term "Chemical Abundances of Stars in the Halo" (CASH) Project. A spectrum was obtained with the High Resolution Spectrograph (HRS) on the Hobby-Eberly Telescope with a resolving power of R 15

The formation of galactic discs and the efficiency of star formation within them are issues central to our understanding of galaxy formation. We have developed a detailed and versatile model of disc formation which combines the strengths of previous studies of isolated discs with those of hierarchical galaxy formation models. Disc structure is

We review the progress of ESO/WFI Imaging and VLT/FLAMES spectroscopy of large numbers of individual stars in nearby dwarf spheroidal galaxies by the Dwarf Abundances and Radial-velocities Team (DART). These observations have allowed us to show that neither the kinematics nor the abundance nor the spatial distributions are easy to explain in a

We have carried out a complete analysis of the kinematics and the stellar populations of the double-barred S0 galaxy NGC 357. We have measured suitable absorption line strength indices on very high quality spectra. With the aid of stellar population models we have obtained the relative ages and metallicities for the different components to

APOGEE is a large-scale, NIR, high-resolution (R 20,000) spectroscopic survey of Galactic stars, and is one of the four experiments in the SDSS-III suite. APOGEE will provide, by orders of magnitude, the largest uniform database of chemical abundances, spectroscopic parallaxes and kinematics for Galactic stars across the bulge, disk, and halo. The