Research Interests

My research integrates molecular approaches and a modern evolutionary perspective to address questions in microbiology and infectious diseases. Microbial evolution permits the study of evolution in real-time and enables researchers to design experiments to address fundamental questions in biology. Microbes represent an excellent system for evolutionary studies due to their rapid reproduction, laboratory maintenance, simple genomes, and ease of manipulation. The design of evolution experiments is extremely flexible and can be modified to test hypotheses in evolutionary biology and many other fields. My research program is founded on the use of experimental evolution as tool to study the molecular basis of microbial traits.



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