Dr. Grimaldi’s research is broadly concerned with the evolution of insects, from species-level diversity in drosophilid fruit flies to the phylogeny of orders over the past 400 million years.  The research relies on fieldwork collecting recent species and excavating new deposits, exploratory morphology, study of insect fossils (particularly those exquisitely preserved in amber), and phylogenetics.  This information is then used as a scaffold for the interpretation of ecological and evolutionary patterns in insects.  A major research project at present includes the relation between the radiations of insects and angiosperms in the Cretaceous.  This project is based primarily on the systematics of insects preserved in diverse deposits of Cretaceous amber from New Jersey, Myanmar, Lebanon, Alaska, and other localities.  Another major project is on a diverse deposit of Triassic insects from Virginia, the only such deposit in the Western Hemisphere.  Ongoing research explores the diversity and biogeography of a Miocene community preserved in amber from Hispaniola.