ITC Colloquium - Keivan Stassun & Marina Kounkel (Vanderbilt)

"Fundamental Stellar Astrophysics in the Gaia Era: A New Understanding of Local Stellar Populations "

We begin with an overview of the precision stellar astrophysics enabled by the confluence of Gaia parallaxes with large-scale photometric and spectroscopic surveys. We then give examples of the new understanding of local Galactic structure that this has enabled, including in particular the detailed history of canonical star-forming regions, and the discovery of "stellar strings" reflecting the local conditions of recent star formation.