We study mechanisms by which cells learn to thrive in new environments. From yeast scattered across the landscape to malignant cells facing targeted anticancer drugs, adaptation is required for survival. We question how new adaptive mutations arise amongst drug treated populations to understand the paths to drug resistance.

We focus on molecular mechanisms that link a cell's perception of the environment to its genome:
-Control of gene expression and regulatory non-coding RNAs
-Histone modifications and chromatin structure
-Replication and recombination
Overall, we ask how cells process information about their environment to yield the appropriate gene expression response, and how this informationn is applied as they adapt to challenging new environments.

We tend to think of genomes as long-term stable repositories of information, providing all the information required to produce an organism. However, genomes can change, and not just over evolutionary timescales. Genome changes are a hallmark of cancer, but it is increasingly clear that some genetic loci are very prone to change in healthy cells during the lifespan of various organisms. We have discovered that mutations are actively stimulated at particular loci in response to particular environments, suggesting that organisms have much more control of their genomes than we normally consider. We are now asking how cells can stimulate mutations in a controlled manner, and how they process environmental information to select target genes.