I am a microbial evolutionary ecologist with focus on insect-microbial symbiosis and eco-evolutionary dynamics. I endeavor to understand how insects have evolved with microbial symbionts as an interface between them and their environments, and how microorganisms can be used to test and further develop eco-evolutionary theory. Research in my lab is aimed at understanding why we observe the relationships that we do in nature, and so we use fieldwork, bench work (both culture work and molecular biology), and the synthesis of large ‘omics datasets in a variety of systems, to get at the answers.