I study how animals move. This means that I work at interface between engineering and biology and physics. Specifically, I try to understand how plants and animals integrate passive elastic elements (tendons, exoskeletons, cellular membranes) to push the boundaries of biological motion. Storing and releasing energy in spring-like materials can side-step limitations of actuators, like muscle, and expand the limits of performance. But springs don't always help. So, a big part of my work is trying to understand when and how they do. It turns out that systems that can take advantage of elastic elements require tight tuning between the driven mass, the spring and muscle physical properties, and the temporal tuning of muscle activations. I call this combination of morphological and neural components an 'elastic system'.
Understanding the tuning of elastic systems requires an integrative approach. I aim to understand how variations in morphology, sensory feedback and neural control interact to allow organisms to improve performance with elastic elements. Since each element in an elastic system can also change over time, I'm also curious whether or how they stay in tune 1) over evolutionary time as species adapt and specialize for different functions, 2) across an individual's lifetime as they plastically respond to their environment, and 3) during events as individuals modulate their system for different goals or to compensate for perturbations.
To study this, I combine surgical manipulations, growth studies, and in-vivo measurements with biomechanical analyses, wearable robotics and musculoskeletal computational modeling. This allows me to study these questions both at the mechanistic level 'under the skin' as well link these mechanistic changes to whole organism performance.
Understanding the tuning of elastic systems requires an integrative approach. I aim to understand how variations in morphology, sensory feedback and neural control interact to allow organisms to improve performance with elastic elements. Since each element in an elastic system can also change over time, I'm also curious whether or how they stay in tune 1) over evolutionary time as species adapt and specialize for different functions, 2) across an individual's lifetime as they plastically respond to their environment, and 3) during events as individuals modulate their system for different goals or to compensate for perturbations.
To study this, I combine surgical manipulations, growth studies, and in-vivo measurements with biomechanical analyses, wearable robotics and musculoskeletal computational modeling. This allows me to study these questions both at the mechanistic level 'under the skin' as well link these mechanistic changes to whole organism performance.
Physical constraints over evolutionary time
How does physics limit biology?
What are the physical constraints on the performance of elastic systems? |
Plasticity over an individual's lifetime
How do individuals tune their elastic system for different functions, in different environments or after injury?
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Neural control
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