He especially enjoys molds. You can't see bacteria, but you can see molds. Kind of neat to be able to see what you're working on, and molds are incredibly diverse organisms.
Molds are interesting, visible, and affect the world's food supply.
Molds that occur on wheat and malting barley are the subject of three of the projects. Two tilletia species affect wheat kernels. In tilletia-infested wheat, the kernels look normal from the outside, but the kernel is completely replaced by mold spores. They have two closely related tilletia species with different germination characteristics, and are trying to understand the biochemistry of these differences. In a related project, they are examining the growth of tilletia spores, specifically analyzing the lipid components.