I will review our series of successful programs to dissect the ?interstellar medium of distant, star-forming galaxies with the Atacama ?Large Millimeter Array (ALMA). In particular, I will discuss surveys ?of the set of HI-selected galaxies known as the damped Lya systems ?(DLAs). We resolve, in part, a decades old struggle to identify the ?galactic counterparts of these DLAs and thereby place them firmly in ?the modern picture of galaxy formation. I will also highlight high ?spectral and spatial resolution observations of the Wolfe Disk, a z~4 ?galaxy with a Milky Way-like rotation curve.

BIO
J. Xavier Prochaska, professor of Astronomy & ?Astrophysics at the University of California, Santa Cruz and also ?Astronomer at the University of California Observatories. His research ?examines the nature of gas both within and outside of galaxies, ?primarily during the first few billion years of the universe, shedding ?light on early cosmology and structure formation in the universe, ?including the formation and evolution of galaxies. Three times in the ?last decade (2011, 2014, and 2015), his discoveries have been ?recognized by the editors of Physics World, Science, or Astronomy as ?among the top scientific breakthroughs of the year.

Prochaska earned his B.S. in physics at Princeton University and M.S. ?and Ph.D. in physics at UC San Diego. He was a Carnegie Fellow and a ?Hubble Fellow at the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena before joining ?the faculty at UC Santa Cruz in 2002.