Dr. Crandall is a founding participant of the Earth BioGenome Project, setting standards and targets for sequencing genomes of all living organisms on Earth. In addition to helping organize the overall project, Dr. Crandall has also contributed genome assemblies and associated raw data to the project, for example, the Gooseneck Barnacle genome, Pollicipes pollicipes.

Dr. Crandall serves on the Executive Committee of the Clinical and Translational Science Institute at Children's National, in partnership with The George Washington University. The CTSI-CN offers unique resources in translating discovery to improved health. It provides highly integrated, cost-effective, investigator-focused resources designed to overcome research barriers, promote collaborative research, and provide research training with a special focus on children’s health. With an emphasis on health disparities and childhood antecedents to adult diseases, CTSI-CN builds upon its pediatric research strengths in areas such as rare diseases, asthma, and neuro-developmental disabilities to collaborate with a national network of 1,200 community health centers.

As an investigator with the District of Columbia Center for AIDS Research, Dr. Crandall studies HIV population dynamics, phylodynamics, the evolution of drug resistance, and gene flow as an indicator of transmission patterns. The mission of the DC CFAR is to expand our multi-institutional effort to support research aimed at ending the HIV epidemic in Washington, DC and beyond in partnership with local government and community.

Dr. Crandall was a principal investigator with the Open Tree of Life, which links all biodiversity through a shared evolutionary history. This project produced the first online, comprehensive first-draft tree of all 2.3 million named species, accessible to both the public and scientific communities. Assembly of the tree incorporates previously-published results, with strong collaborations between computational and empirical biologists to develop, test and improve methods of data synthesis. This initial tree of life is dynamic with contributors from around the world.