I am a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Entomology at the University of Illinois.  My research concerns biological diversity and the processes that generate it, and is motivated by a long-standing interest in natural history.  My focal organisms are usually ants, but recently I have been delving into the evolutionary history of beetles and some of the parasitic wasps.

I study biological diversity from two perspectives.  The first research perspective is descriptive, producing taxonomic revisions, catalogues of regional faunas, and descriptions of new taxa.  The second perspective is historical, involving the inference of evolutionary relationships among taxa using DNA sequence data. 

This site contains synopses of some recent research projects, several of my publications, my C.V., and a link to myrmecos.net, my gallery of insect photographs.