Star formation is the fundamental building process of galaxies and an ongoing process during planet formation. Yet we cannot yet look at an interstellar cloud and predict how many stars will form, where, or how their masses are determined. This is a golden age for star formation studies with an unprecedented amount of data currently being returned from an array of large-area survey instruments at infrared and submillimetre wavelengths (Spitzer and Herschel space telescopes, SCUBA-2 on JCMT). These surveys will be followed in quick succession by high-resolution probes of the individual collapse and accretion processes (ALMA, e-MERLIN). For your PhD, you will address these fundamental questions of star formation using observations of nearby molecular clouds, where we have the spatial resolution to resolve individual star-forming events and study the inner workings of the star-formation process.