 We try and help to make things that are unseen seen. We try and make things visible. And that's really important in biology because a lot of times you just don't know when you look in a microscope if molecularly what you think is going on is actually what's going on. And I think what we do is very important because we try and get closer and closer to the idea of molecular level imaging. For everything that we publish, we try many things that don't work. And that's what we should be doing always. So there's a fair amount of failure. And a lot of times we learn the most when things don't work. You sort of have to develop a thick skin because, frankly, most of the stuff we try doesn't work. Use physics to invent, design, and build new kinds of microscopes to see things that no one's ever seen before. So my boss, Hari, was giving a talk at my university and I saw the abstractivist talk. And I thought I knew some things about optics and I was pretty sure that what he said in his abstract was impossible. So I went to his talk to tell him that he was wrong. He was not wrong. I was very wrong. So at the end of the talk I asked him for a job. And that's how I ended up here. For about a hundred years there was a belief more or less that there was a hard limit for the sharpest image that an optical microscope could take. And then in the past decade or so there have been a number of breakthroughs that show, no, that's not really true. There were assumptions. One thing that we've invented recently is a microscope that provides double the resolution of a conventional microscope you can buy. And is also applicable in sort of relatively thick samples like embryos. This is sort of a new thing. Resolution doubling microscopes have existed before but they only are good for single cells. We also think about microscopes that are better at imaging specimens less invasively, so without damaging them. Every time you shine light on something you perturb it a little bit. And most microscopes out there today are sort of unsuitable for long term imaging of let's say embryos or other sensitive live biological specimens. So a good deal of what we think about is how to make microscopes better suited to that study. An example of a more biological problem we're genuinely interested in is how the nervous system wires inside living organisms. Inside a very simple organism like a worm. So if you want to ask the question like how do all the neurons come together to create a brain. One method for answering that question is to actually visualize it. But the data set for that problem doesn't exist yet because most microscopes that are available will fry the embryo in the course of imaging all of these different cells in time and in three dimensions. So one thing that we're doing in collaboration with groups at Yale and Sloan Kettering is we're providing microscopes that actually let you image samples for many hours. About 14 hours and noninvasively to see this brain develop inside an intact organism. What we kind of hope is that by studying the way that the nervous system forms inside the worm we'll discover general rules about how neurons seek out other neurons that would be applicable in higher order organisms like the fish, the fly or the human. The future of our work I think will be make a few general purpose tools. Try to genuinely pick a few of the workhorses of the field that everyone uses and make them slightly better. And then, and we've already started to do this to some degree, go looking for specific problems in biology, important problems that are resistant to existing techniques and design specific techniques to solve those exact problems. You know, I hope that the kind of work that we do, the sort of approaches we develop enable other people to go further than we can. And so, you know, the idea is that whatever simple rules we might discover in the worm, you know, almost certainly are not going to be sort of exactly the way things are in the human. But, you know, one can imagine sort of scaling these things up.