Professor Balogh's research uses the world’s largest telescopes to study the physical properties of distant galaxies. Through spectroscopy we can learn about the distances, ages, chemical composition and star formation histories of these galaxies. As the light we observe from more distant objects originated at earlier times, by observing ever more distant systems we can reconstruct the changes that occur over time to populations of galaxies. His particular expertise lies in trying to understand the source of the puzzling link between galaxy growth rates and surrounding large-scale structure, many orders of magnitude larger than the galaxies themselves.