DR. PETRI VAISANEN

I present our "SUNBIRD" survey of local luminous IR galaxies utilizing adaptive optics imaging in the near-IR at VLT and Gemini together with SALT/RSS optical spectroscopy. We investigate the physical details of star-formation and its triggering/history as a function of galaxy interaction stage and type, environment, and metallicity. We search for extremely obscured supernovae and characterize the super star cluster (SSC) populations in the host galaxies. In particular, I will summarize some recent results on these SSC studies and discuss the use of SALT spectra for star-formation and kinematics studies.