The overall goal of my research is to achieve a better understanding of the evolutionary relationships among animals. My work concerns animal groups distant from each other, such as rodents, sponges, myxozoans, and tunicates. The dramatic increase in available genomic sequences that are emerging from Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) approaches, has revolutionized the field of phylogeny: while previous species trees were reconstructed based on only a few dozen genes, nowadays hundreds of genes can be simultaneously analyzed. In my current research, I thus harness NGS and bioinformatics tools to reconstruct animal evolution.