In this thesis I focused on the study of the dwarf galaxies in the Local Group (LG). Since they can be resolved into stars, this group of galaxies offers a perfect laboratory to address the still open problems in galaxy formation and evolution. In addition, the LG is composed by a unique mixture of all the morphological types of dwarfs, namely

Massive early-type galaxies undergo a significant process of evolution with redshift on the stellar mass vs size plane. Furthermore, this trend does not depend on the age of their stellar populations. Therefore, such an evolution should involve processes that do not include a significant amount of star formation, leaving (mostly) dry mergers as the

We present a new method to solve the star formation history (SFH) of a complex stellar population system from the analysis of the color-magnitude diagram (CMD). The SFH is obtained in four steps: i) computing a synthetic CMD, ii) simulating observational effects, iii) parametrization and sampling of the synthetic and observed CMDs, and iv) solving

The chemical evolution of asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars depends greatly on the input physics (e.g., mass loss recipe, convective model). Variations in the hot bottom burning (HBB) strength, third dredge-up (TDU) efficiency and AGB evolutionary timescale are among the main consequences of adopting different input physics. The ATON evolutionary

We investigate the influence of interactions on the star formation by studying a sample of almost 1500 of the nearest galaxies, all within a distance of ~45 Mpc. We define the massive star formation rate (SFR), as measured from far-IR emission, and the specific star formation rate (SSFR), which is the former quantity normalized by the stellar mass

We have observed 3 pairs of interacting galaxies (the Antennae, Arp 236, and NGC 1614) using the Fabry-Perot interferometer GHαFaS (Galaxy Hα Fabry-Perot system) on the 4.2m William Herschel Telescope (WHT) at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma. We have extracted the physical properties (sizes, Hα luminosity and velocity