Bacterial cells come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes. Within a given class, however, cells typically grow and divide in such a way as to maintain the particular shape and size distribution programmed by their genome. Research in my laboratory is focused on understanding how these programs are executed by uncovering the molecular mechanisms organizing cell envelope assembly and promoting cell division. The general problems we wish to address are: i) how the synthetic machineries that make the cell membrane, cell wall (peptidoglycan), and other envelope layers are coordinated in space and time to construct a cell with uniform shape, ii) how the cell division machinery drives the invagination of the cell envelope and builds the new daughter cell poles, and iii) how cells know where and when to divide in the first place. A multidisciplinary approach including genetics, biochemistry, microscopy, and genomics will be taken to address these questions using the Gram-negative rod Escherichia coli as our primary model bacterium. Ideally, our work will not only help further our understanding of fundamental aspects of bacterial cell biology, but will also provide new avenues with which to short-circuit the bacterial growth program for potential therapeutic intervention.