The goal of my research group is to understand the physical and biological factors that guide the replication and transmission of infectious disease, with an emphasis on enveloped viruses and the long-term goal of developing new therapies. My approach to this challenge spans multiple scales, working to understand how molecules give rise to specific viral phenotypes, and how these phenotypes determine the virus’s ability to propagate under the constraints found in cells, tissues, and organisms. To pursue this goal, I develop new chemical tools for imaging and reconstituting enveloped virus assembly and new technologies for modeling the physiological environment in which replication takes place. These tools will help determine the mechanistic links between the molecular basis of virus assembly and the transmission of viruses within and between hosts. An engineering-level understanding of how enveloped viruses assemble and navigate the host environment will establish a foundation for understanding a wide variety of other questions in biological assembly, for identifying new small molecule inhibitors of virus assembly, and for developing new virus-based anticancer therapies.