Over the last ten years my research has focussed more and more on combinatorial objects called "strings" -- that is, sequences of letters such as abaababa or ablewasiereisawelba drawn from a specified alphabet. I am interested in algorithms that compute patterns in strings, especially repetitive patterns. Patterns of this kind are of interest in a great many diverse fields: DNA sequence analysis, cryptography, analysis of musical texts, data compression, and computational geometry. When a colleague originally suggested that I start to work in the field of "stringology", my initial response was that strings were too easy, they had no structure, there could be no interesting problems and only trivial applications -- how wrong I was!
If you think you might be interested in this area of research, you can download some of the papers listed under Refereed Publications and take a look at them. My work is very mathematical in nature, but it is mostly discrete mathematics and does not usually require a lot of specialized knowledge -- just a good CPU!