SHOALS · The Swift GRB Host Galaxy Legacy Survey: Understanding the Link between GRBs and Star Formation from the Nearby to the Early Universe

I propose to carry out the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Host Galaxy Legacy Survey (SHOALS), a multi-national, multi-facility, multi-wavelength effort to characterize the gamma-ray burst host galaxy population and how it connects to other star-forming galaxy populations at high redshift. Gamma-ray bursts represent invaluable tracers of the conditions in distant galaxies and provide a unique means of measuring the contribution of the faintest and highest-redshift galaxies to stellar mass assembly, yet we still do not understand what their progenitor system is or what environmental influences cause GRBs to explode more frequently in certain types of galaxies than others. By intensively charactering a large population of uniformly-selected GRB hosts across cosmic history, I will disentangle the various factors that may influence GRB production (chemical composition, starburst intensity, population age) and apply these results to better understanding how these violent explosions are produced and how we can use them to better understand the earliest phases of galaxy evolution.