I am the head of the Milky Way and Local Volume research section at the AIP. My team of about 25 researchers is involved in the RAVE, SEGUE, APOGEE, Gaia-ESO, VMC, PRISTINE, and GHOSTS surveys, and develops software for the Gaia space mission. Others find the nearest and coolest dwarf stars, the most massive stars known to mankind, or determine distances to Cepheid RR Lyrae stars. My group furthermore develops chemical, dynamical, and cosmological models of galaxies to be compared with data in the local Universe. My personal research concentrates on nearby galaxies and the Milky Way; their structure, stellar and dust content, and the distribution of mass within them, and putting these measurements in the context hierarchical galaxy formation models. I am also Principal Investigator of 4MOST, a wide-field, high-multiplex, fiber-fed spectroscopic facility under construction for the VISTA telescope of the European Southern Observatory (ESO).