What are the currently hot subjects in biology?

I am currently in my final year of undergraduate and I've secored a place as an animal taxonomy lecturer in the Biology Dept., Univ. of Indonesia. However the Chairman of Dept. wants me to obtain a masters degree before I start to teach. I was thinking about getting it abroad. Anybody know what should I do for MS research? Preferably in evolutionary biology research.Currently I am doing termite alpha-taxonomy (as in 'walking around in the woods, breaking into termite nests and picking samples to see if I can collect something new...')

Cornell has some interesting entomology and Liebherr in the Museum has something to say about were the buggers may be found. I dont know if he knows about termites but there was some "classic" stuff done on the African ones at CU (that is a dim recollection only). You could certainly find people interested in the critters alpha and omega without encountering my ideas on reprodution etc if you come to Ithaca. People here like the evolution attitude.

AndyaSince you're a taxonomic type person why don't you link your favourite field with the (justifiably) trendy topic of genomic sciences? Cross-disciplinary. My suggested project would be to carefully redefine taxonomy genomically via comparative genomics.This would be a bioinformatics type project which doesn't really go along with termite field work but this is exciting work that needs to be done. Define species, genera, families and higher taxa genomically. Look for core genomes, study genomic loss vs gain etc. If you can come to Australia you can do it in my lab . But I suspect you wouldn't want a Masters or PhD under a creationist supervisor.The down-side of the project is that you might discover created kinds as a natural outcome of the research .[This message has been edited by Tranquility Base, 09-08-2002]