The primary goal of my research program is to understand the suite of processes that control growth and survival of juvenile fishes and lead to variability in recruitment into adult stocks. This "recruitment problem" is at the core of many issues in both basic and applied fisheries population biology and underlies the majority of research that my students and I are involved in. We use a combination of whole lake experiments, observations in nature, laboratory experiments and simulation models to explore these processes at a range of spatial and temporal scales.