I will present the star formation work we have done at Universidad de Chile. Starting with the establishment of the Maipu radio observatory in the 1960s, radio-astronomy was the first modern astrophysical expertise developed in Chile, before the advent of modern telescopes in the north of Chile. The 1980s brought the establishment of the 1.2m Columbia telescope at CTIO for the Milky Way CO 1-0 survey, and later the SEST 15m telescope. Thus, we began the study of dense gas in star forming regions. The 2000s brought the high frequency regime with the advent of the ASTE and APEX telescopes and now high angular resolution with ALMA. I will explain some of the survey work we have carried with the above instruments and how it led to the discovery of landmark sources that we are studying now with ALMA. Finally, I will mention what we hope to accomplish with ALMA in the forthcoming decade, in particular with the establishment of the Chilean Virtual Observatory.