text: 7,77,1074847023696736256,23104038,Dr Katie Grasha,"The single hardest thing I've ever done my entire life is finally done with. We combine the GMC catalog from the PAWS survey with the LEGUS star cluster catalogs in the Whirlpool galaxy M51.  We find a few things: <LINK> (1) We find that star clusters remain associated with their birth GMCs for about 4-6 Myr. This is a longer timescale than in NGC7793 (Grasha+18, MNRAS, 481, 1016). A result of the higher surface density in M51, which constrains the winds (feedback), thus increasing the timescale. (2) The correlation function of the GMCs are significantly flatter than that of the star clusters. When we tune the star formation efficiency of the GMCs until the correlation function resembles that of the star clusters, we find that the GMCs have a SFE of just a few percent. Thus, only the most massive GMCs are capable of forming the young, massive star clusters we observe.  <LINK> Nothing can describe the work that went into this paper The final, published paper is dramatically different than what I had originally submitted. I encourage people to look up chapter 5 of my dissertation, the paper in its original submitted form.  <LINK>",https://arxiv.org/abs/1812.06109,"We present a study correlating the spatial locations of young star clusters with those of molecular clouds in NGC~5194, in order to investigate the timescale over which clusters separate from their birth clouds. The star cluster catalogues are from the Legacy ExtraGalactic UV Survey (LEGUS) and the molecular clouds from the Plateau de Bure Interefrometer Arcsecond Whirpool Survey (PAWS). We find that younger star clusters are spatially closer to molecular clouds than older star clusters. The median ages for clusters associated with clouds is 4~Myr whereas it is 50~Myr for clusters that are sufficiently separated from a molecular cloud to be considered unassociated. After $\sim$6~Myr, the majority of the star clusters lose association with their molecular gas. Younger star clusters are also preferentially located in stellar spiral arms where they are hierarchically distributed in kpc-size regions for 50-100~Myr before dispersing. The youngest star clusters are more strongly clustered, yielding a two-point correlation function with $\alpha=-0.28\pm0.04$, than the GMCs ($\alpha=-0.09\pm0.03$) within the same PAWS field. However, the clustering strength of the most massive GMCs, supposedly the progenitors of the young clusters for a star formation efficiency of a few percent, is comparable ($\alpha=-0.35\pm0.05$) to that of the clusters. We find a galactocentric-dependence for the coherence of star formation, in which clusters located in the inner region of the galaxy reside in smaller star-forming complexes and display more homogeneous distributions than clusters further from the centre. This result suggests a correlation between the survival of a cluster complex and its environment. ","The Spatial Relation between Young Star Clusters and Molecular Clouds in