Connecting the physical properties of AGN and galaxies

The relationship between the properties of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and the physical properties of the galaxies they lie in can reveal the environments that promote supermassive hole growth and the potential impact of AGN feedback on galaxy evolution. I will discuss how AGN may be identified at a range of wavelengths - X-ray, optical, infrared and radio - and how all of these selection methods suffer from biases that depend on the properties of the host galaxy. I will present work that accounts for these selection biases, revealing the true extent of AGN across the galaxy population and the detailed dependence of black hole accretion activity on galaxy stellar mass and star formation rate. These measurements also show how the level of black hole accretion can vary on short timescales relative to galaxy-wide processes and how this variability blurs the underlying connections between AGN and the physical properties of galaxies.