Joan Strassmann joined Rice in 1980. Her research centers upon cooperative alliances that have proven successful both evolutionarily and ecologically. She is particularly interested in how these alliances came to be, how conflicts are subsumed into cooperation, what conflicts remain and how they influence sociality. Strassmann has conducted fieldwork on social insects in Italy, Brazil, Venezuela, and Virginia.

David Queller joined Rice in 1984. He is interested in the evolution of social interactions in contexts that involve cooperation, conflict or both. He has studied wasps and stingless bees to determine the benefits of sociality, the role of genetic relatedness and the extent of conflicts within social insect societies.

Strassmann and Queller currently have turned their focus toward Dictyostelium discoideum, using well-developed genetic and genomic resources for the social amoebae to find genes involved in social interactions, and they are using those genes to test evolutionary hypotheses, such as whether social evolution is particularly rapid.