I have been involved in the development and applications of non-relativistic effective theories of QCD and QED for quite some time. I'm currently interested in several related issues: (i) understanding the so called XYZ resonances in heavy quarkonium systems, namely charmonium and bottomonium (ii) the evolution of heavy quarkonium in media (in particular in the context of heavy ion collisions ) as an open quantum system and (iii) developing suitable effective theories for quasi on-shell particles, in particular with regard to thermal field theories.