Ages, Kinematics, and Chemistry of Stellar Populations. A program begun in 1991 will be carried to completion in the solar neighborhood wherein Dr. Laird, together with Dr. Bruce Carney at the University of North Carolina, will identify several thousand G dwarf stars, then determine accurate radial velocities and metallicities to test the discrete versus continuum models of the thick disk and thin disk populations. The local sample will be complemented by an on-going program aimed at the outer Galactic disk, now detected in the direction of the southern Galactic warp. The age of the thin disk relative to the thick disk and halo will be derived using field binary stars. The study of the nearest neighboring extragalactic disk population, that of the Large Magellanic Cloud, will be studied from high precision radial velocities and metallicities of giant stars.
