My research is focused on the development and application of effective field theories to quantum chromodynamics, with the ultimate goal of achieving a deeper understanding of the strong interactions that underlie nuclear physics. Measurements of QCD made by contemporary nuclear and particle experiments are often complicated by the presence of multiple disparate energy scales which obscure the relevant physics. The effective theories I develop and work with provide a powerful organizing tool for systematically separating different scales, resulting in a simpler and more predictive framework. I have worked on non-relativistic effective theories of the strong interactions (NRQCD), an effective theory of heavy nucleons coupled to pions, heavy-quark effective theory (HQET), and soft collinear effective theory (SCET).