His research interests lie at the interface of marine microbiology and natural products chemistry. His lab addresses fundamental questions such as what marine microbes produce natural products, where they live, why they make them, and how to better exploit them for useful purposes including drug discovery. While working with cultured microorganisms is an important aspect of this research, culture independent approaches are providing important new insight into microbial diversity in various marine habitats and how effectively it has been accessed for natural product discovery. Advances in “omic” technologies have fundamentally changed the approaches used in natural products research and opened exciting new frontiers for drug discovery.