Robert Unckless is an Associate Professor in the Department of Molecular Biosciences and an affiliate member of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Center for Computational Biology at Kansas University. He serve as the Director of the KU Center for Genomics and was named an Edward and Thelma Wohlgemuth Faculty Scholar. He earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell University (1997), where he also completed a Master's degree (1999). He then taught high school science for 7 years in Massachusetts and New York. In 2006, he began a PhD program at the University of Rochester, studying with John Jaenike and H. Allen Orr (completed in 2011). He returned to Cornell University for his postdoctoral research, working with Brian Lazzaro and Andy Clark. Dr. Unckless joined the University of Kansas in 2016. His research focuses on evolutionary genomics of conflict. This conflict is often between hosts and pathogens or parasites, but also involves interaction between different entities within a genome. His lab use Drosophila to study interactions between hosts and bacteria, viruses and fungi. His lab also study meiotic drive (where chromosomes kill gametes containing homologous chromosomes) in Drosophila. The lab uses genomics, genetics, computational biology, microbiology and biochemistry to address fundamental questions in the biology of conflict.