He has received continuous funding for his research since 2007 from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. His projects are single-investigator endeavors that have brought almost $2 million of extramural funds to the university. He has been a reviewer for the NSF for many years, and he is a member of an NIH review panel. In his research, he addresses questions of animal development, growth and metabolism using a genetic model organism, Drosophila melanogaster. Although his research could be categorized as "biomedical," his success with the NSF argues that being "biomedical" should not be a reason to avoid this agency as a potential funding source.