His lab seeks to understand the molecular mechanisms that guide an axon, allowing it to find just the right partners from among all the myriad cells of the nervous system. His laboratory also seeks to understand why axons don't make guidance mistakes, given the intricacy of the trajectories they need to navigate. To understand these processes in humans, he studies neural circuits of fruit flies, a model system that allows biochemical and cell biological approaches to be merged with classical and molecular genetics.