My research probes galaxy evolution over a time span of about 11 billion years, and tries to answer questions such as: What did galaxies look like when the Universe was young? How can we best describe galaxies in a quantitative way? How do changes in galactic structure map onto ideas for the underlying physics of galaxy evolution? Technological advances drive my efforts to answer these questions: at the moment I am building a novel telescope array in New Mexico to image very faint structures in nearby galaxies, and I am using Adaptive Optics on large telescopes to study the evolution of galaxy sizes over cosmic time.