Abstract
I will review ongoing work aimed at understanding when and how the major structural components of our Galaxy came into place. The combination of Gaia and ground-based spectroscopic data has revealed that the stellar halo contains a remarkable degree of structure, and appears to have formed partially by dynamical processes within the disk, and partially from accreted dwarf galaxies. Our simulations of the stellar disk predict that the clustered nature of star formation imprints a high degree of structure in phase+chemistry space. This structure is now being measured in the data, and promises to deliver new insights into the nature of star formation and the dynamical history of the disk.