Michael Travisano’s long-term research goals are in understanding the causes of biological diversity and complexity. While natural selection is the ultimate cause for both, that level of explanation is not sufficient to understand how the myriad forms of life have come to exist. Mike’s research program is essentially a series of studies of increasingly more complicated biological systems, where the first projects were with a single species of free-living bacteria. Since those first experiments, the work of the Travisano lab has branched out to include simple eukaryotes, predator-prey interactions, and microbial communities, all of which was possible because of the earlier work.