MG11 
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A survey of GRB host galaxies with the Spitzer Space Telescope

While long GRBs are known to originate from galaxies harboring massive star-forming activity, the reliability of these events as unbiased probes of the --integrated-- star formation history of the Universe is still debated. I will present the first results of a on-going program targetting 56 long GRB hosts using the infrared Spitzer Space Telescope, with the goal of characterizing their mass and extinction-corrected star formation rates. I will emphasize the comparison of these objects with the massive and infrared-luminous starbursts responsible for a significant fraction of the stellar mass assembly at high redshifts. I will show that GRB hosts are statistically less active and less evolved. I will discuss implications in both our undersanding of the formation of such events as well as the use of GRBs as star formation tracers.