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For decades now, I have used museum specimens to study the systematics and biogeography of Neotropical mammals.  Collaborating with scientists and students in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, I have worked throughout the Andes, Amazônia, and in Atlantic, Valdivian, and Magellanic Forests. As we document some of the world's richest, most highly endemic faunas, we regularly discover and describe new species of bats, rodents and marsupials, and use them in regional and continental reconstructions of phylogeny and biogeography. This program has offered abundant training opportunities for American and Latin American students, both in the lab and in the field. Much of my recent work on Neotropical faunas has been in collaboration with former "sandwich fellows" Renan Maestri, Anderson Feijo, Carla Hendges, Rafaela Missagia, Roger Guimarães, Luiza Gasparetto, Lucas Carneiro and others.

Collecting parasites in the course of this work led to my interest in Host-parasite coevolution. Ectoparasites recovered from mammals (mainly bats) are used to reconstruct the radiation of parasite groups and to assess their distributions across hosts and geography.  These studies identify factors governing the distribution, abundance, and host specificity of parasites.  Together with Carl Dick (Western Kentucky U.), Katharina Dittmar (SUNY Buffalo and NSF), and Megan Porter (U. Hawaii at Manoa), we are pursuing a broad range of studies on the ecology, coevolution, and phylogeny of these interesting flies. Former Postdoc Holly Lutz's program looking at endosymbionts and microbiomes has greatly expanded the scope of my interests.