I generally have about four or five students conduct research with me each year. While I am willing to allow them to work on whatever topic they choose, I've had greatest success when they let me direct them in a what I hope will be a productive direction. I guess that means that I've learned something about doing research over the past few years. Many of my students have gone to remote field sites to study spiders - in New Mexico we lived in tents for two months each summer without running water or electricity. We got to know each other pretty well, and I think everybody learned a great deal about doing research. Currently, I'm working on zebrafish, which are native to India and the Phillipines - I don't anticipate any field research with these animals in the immediate future. However, I hope to expand my spider research program to consider local species, in which case I will be back in the field research business (which is what I enjoy the most).
To give you a feeling for the types of research I do, I'm listing some
topics of student investigations.