We are fascinated with plant biodiversity, particularly as it relates to documenting rare tropical species and understanding how plant specialized metabolism evolved.  Therefore we we split most of our time either tromping around rainforests or trying to document what metabolites plants make and then understand how they evolved to produce them.  This largely involves traveling to Malaysia or resurrecting extinct proteins from ancestral plants and studying their functionalities in the lab.  To find out more please visit our Research Projects and Publications web pages.