Professor Eickbush is a molecular and evolutionary biologist whose research interests are in retrotransposable elements, in particular those elements that specifically insert into the ribosomal RNA genes of their hosts. He is currently a professor and chair of the Department of Biology. His laboratory studies the endonucleases and reverse transcriptases involved in the mechanisms of retrotransposition, the co-expression of the elements with the rRNA genes, the epigenetic controls over that expression, the population level parameters that determine both the number of elements and the number of rRNA genes, and finally the origins and evolution of the elements.