I am very broadly interested in insect evolution.
Insects represent a morphologically as well as developmentally extremely diverse animal group.
This offers an exceptional opportunity to study the mechanisms underlying the evolution of organismal design, one of the most fundamental questions in biology. My research addresses both developmental and phylogenetic issues. It is a very fortunate situation that much of our knowledge on how morphology is generated during development has come from studying an insect, the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. The fruit fly is one of the most important molecular-genetic model organisms. Remarkably, the majority of molecules that have been identified in Drosophila to be involved in development were also found to exert very similar functions in other animal phyla including vertebrates.