The study of resolved stellar populations in nearby galaxies was transformed by the high sensitivity and spatial resolution of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and is now being transformed again with the more powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The results have far-reaching impacts ranging from providing the most detailed and quantitative measures of the star formation histories of low-mass galaxies and insights into their growth across cosmic timescales, to determining precise distances to galaxies throughout the Local Volume which place galaxy properties on an absolute scale and are essential inputs for measuring of the local value of the Hubble Constant.
In this talk, I will (i) highlight recent results from resolved star studies on very low-mass galaxies with HST data, (ii) present the first star formation history of a galaxy with JWST data alongside a comparison to HST data of the same field, and (iii) introduce new tip of the giant branch (TRGB) distance calibrations derived from HST infrared data and JWST data on nearby galaxies, the latter of which paves the way for a JWST-based measure of the Hubble Constant.
