Microbes exhibit many social behaviors that greatly affect natural ecosystems and human concerns in agriculture, medicine and other areas.

We investigate a diverse range of questions regarding the evolution, ecology and molecular biology of bacterial sociality, predation and multicellular development using several research approaches. These include experimental evolution and ecology, comparative analysis of natural populations, genomics and molecular biology.

We pursue many questions of broad conceptual interest, but empirically we focus primarily on the myxobacteria, which have evolved some of the most sophisticated social behaviors found among microbes. These include social motility, group predation of many other microbes and starvation-induced development of multicellular fruiting bodies.