Clotilde Laigle (IAP) Understanding galaxy populations throughout Cosmic Time: Joint analysis of observed and simulated lightcones The study of the co-evolution of the cosmic web and galaxies embedded within it, from the epoch of cosmic dawn (formation of the first galaxies) to today relies heavily on comparisons of real observations on large field with virtual galaxy surveys produced by state-of-the-art cosmological hydrodynamics simulations. They allow to carry out meaningful statistical measurements of the differences between models and observations. In other words, analysing images of galaxies, whether captured by a telescope or generated with a supercomputer tuned to have the same limitations as this telescope, ensures that we are comparing (millions of) apples to apples. I will present results of such comparative analyses based on COSMOS field and Horizon-AGN, which provide invaluable detailed insight on the evolution of galaxy stellar masses and morphological transformations as a function of environment and cosmic time.