Early Star Forming Galaxies and the Reionization of the Universe

With the installation of the Wide Field Camera 3 onboard the Hubble
Space Telescope, the cosmic frontier has been pushed back to just
500Myr after the Big Bang, providing the first large, robust samples
of galaxies in the reionization era.  Detailed study of this
population is now revealing insight into the nature of the earliest
star forming systems and their contribution to reionization. Through
deep spectroscopic measures of their Lyman-alpha emission line
strengths, new constraints are being achieved on the timescale over
which reionization occurred.  I will review the results from these
programs, discussing implications for our understanding of
reionization and concluding with a discussion of prospects and
challenges for the future.