Dr. Sparks is a Computational Biologist with the USDA-ARS Invasive Insect Biocontrol and Behavior Laboratory in Beltsville, MD, USA. He performs biological sequence analysis of urban and agricultural insect pests, with a particular interest in gene families associated with xenobiotic detoxification. He also studies various entomopathogenic/ insecticidal agents with high potential for insect biocontrol, as well as certain insect-vectored, plant-pathogenic microbes. In addition, he has published on such other topics as plant sequence analysis, ruminant metagenomics, epidemiology/ biostatistics, and artificial intelligence/ machine learning.