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Understanding how massive galaxies form and grow is important to galaxy evolution and cosmology. Deep spectroscopy provides us a great opportunity to learn their stellar population properties, stellar initial mass function (IMF), and star formation histories, and understand the physical processes shaping these objects. In the first part of my talk, I will present the stellar IMF in the center of nearby massive galaxies in the MASSIVE survey. I will focus on the relations among stellar IMF, global galaxy properties, and stellar populations and discuss the implications of the physical processes driving the stellar IMF variation. Meanwhile, the connection between the environments (dark matter halos) and the growth and quenching of surrounding galaxies is a crucial piece in the life story of massive galaxies. In the second part, I will present stellar population studies of massive galaxies and their surrounding environments in the nearby galaxy clusters, focusing on the scaling relations between stellar mass and galaxy central stellar population properties from observation and simulation sides.
Meng Gu is a Russell Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Astrophysical Sciences at Princeton University. She studies the formation and evolution of massive galaxies using both observational and theoretical approaches. She earned her bachelor's degree at Nanjing University and a Ph.D. at Harvard University.