His research group works at the interface of experimental evolution and synthetic biology, exploring why microbial evolvability varies and how it can be engineered. He is the recipient of NIH Pathway to Independence and NSF CAREER Awards. Barrick completed his Ph.D. at Yale University, where he worked with Ronald Breaker on discovering new families of metabolite-binding riboswitches and other structured regulatory RNAs. In his postdoc in the lab of Richard Lenski at Michigan State University, he studied genome dynamics in a 25-year evolution experiment with E. coli.