My degrees are in Chemistry (BS) and Biology (PhD) and it was during graduate work at the University of South Florida that I was introduced to the "green world" in the form of the Chlamydomonas chloroplast. Using this unicellular alga model system, I studied photosynthetic membrane biogenesis and regulation. I continued working on Chlamydomonas choroplast biogenesis as a postdoc at the University of Georgia, focussing on mutants affected in molecular genetic processes, before coming to the University of Texas at Austin in 1988. Our discovery of self-splicing introns in the Chlamydomonas chloroplast, which began at Georgia and culminated here in Austin, greatly impacted the direction of the lab for more than 20 years. During this time, we also made discoveries in  transcriptional (by the circadian clock) and post-transcriptional (RNA splicing and mRNA turnover) gene control; intron mobility and evolution; and chloroplast DNA repair. The intron-encoded endonucleases that we discovered, I-CreI and I-CreII, have been studied and/or employed by a number of labs around the world.

For the last several years, we have been developing Chlamydomonas strains for the purpose of sustainable mosquito control. Mosquito larvae must develop in water, and green algae like Chlamydomonas are preferred larval food sources. We believe that we can modify these alga to make them lethal to the larvae, but not to other organisms, and thereby control mosquito populations and the diseases they transmit.