The NANOGrav 12.5-year Dataset: Providing Insights into Galaxy Growth through Cosmic Time*

The NANOGrav collaboration monitors an array of over 70 precisely timed millisecond pulsars with the Green Bank Telescope and Arecibo Observatory in order to detect perturbations due to gravitational waves at nanohertz frequencies. These gravitational waves will most likely result from an ensemble of supermassive black hole binaries. I will present the most recent upper limits on various types of gravitational wave sources and will demonstrate that these limits are already constraining models for galaxy formation and evolution. I will then describe the dramatic gains in sensitivity that are expected from discoveries of millisecond pulsars, more sensitive instrumentation, improved detection algorithms, and international collaboration and show that detection is possible before the end of the decade.