Daniel Schaerer (Geneva Observatory & CNRS) Title: Searches for and properties of the most distant galaxies Abstract: The quest for the most distant galaxies and for the understanding of galaxy formation and evolution in the early Universe remains one of the challenges of contemporary astrophysics. Spectacular breakthroughs have been during the last decade thanks to 8-10m class telescopes and to HST. In this context I will summarise recent results on searches for z>6 galaxies in deep surveys targetting blank fields and using gravitional lensing. I will also show what we have learned so far about the properties of these galaxies in terms of mass, age, SFR, extinction etc. and illustrate the importance of different physical ingredients for the spectral models used to infer these properties.