Biomechanics at Harvard University

Natalie Arkus School of Engineering & Applied Sciences Email: narkus [at] fas.harvard.edu
Natalie Arkus is a 6th year doctoral student in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Her research currently focuses on the biology of aging and on more general mathematical biology questions, such as how to assign a confidence value to the conclusions of both theoretical and experimental works given a certain degree of unknowns. On the theoretical side, she is a member of both Prof. Michael Brenner's and Prof. Mahadevan's labs, and on the experimental side she is a member of Prof. David Sinclair's lab. Natalie Arkus was born and raised in New York City. She attended Columbia University, where she received a B.A. in both physics and mathematical biology and a M.S. in applied math.
Angela Berg Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology Email: amberg [at] fas.harvard.edu
Angela Berg is a 5th year doctoral student in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. Under the advisement of Prof. Biewener at the Concord Field Station, Angela studies the biomechanics of bird flight.  She is particularly interested in how birds control the interaction of their wings with the air to execute maneuvers.  Using high-speed video to obtain kinematic data, her work thus far has examined the differences among ascending, level, and descending flight.  Using fluid visualization and in vivo techniques, she plans to explore the relationships among muscle force, aerodynamic force, and wing shape and motion.
James Bird School of Engineering & Applied Sciences Email: jbird [at] fas.harvard.edu
James Bird is a 5th year doctoral student in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.  His research focuses on fluid dynamics in biological systems.  Prior to arriving at Harvard, James did this by relating coral bleaching with the fluid dynamics around coral reefs.  Now at Harvard, he is interested in experimentally modeling biological systems using microfluidics.  James is a member of both the Weitz and Stone group. James grew up in Washington, D.C.  He attained a B.S. in Engineering from Brown University and a Masters by Research at James Cook University in Australia
Clifford Paul Brangwynne School of Engineering & Applied Sciences Email: brangwyn [at] mpi-cbg.de

Clifford Brangwynne is a former doctoral student in the School of Engineering & Applied Sciences. Broadly, his research involved understanding the structure and mechanics of biological materials and their role in fundamental cell processes such as migration and force generation. Working in the interdisciplinary laboratory of Prof. Dave Weitz, Clifford studied various problems in this area that span over four orders of magnitude in spatial scale, from the mechanics of biopolymer networks and the physics of biopolymer bending fluctuations to the invasion patterns of brain tumors growing into the surrounding tissue

Clifford grew up in the Boston area. He received his B.S. from Carnegie Mellon University, where he majored in Materials Science and Engineering with a Physics minor.

Clifford's thesis is titled, "Mechanics and dynamics of microtubule bending . "  He has accepted a postdoctoral position at Max Planck Institute for Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics and Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems. He is located in Dresden, Germany.

Alexander Cobb Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology Email: acobb [at] bio.umass.edu

Alexander Cobb is a former doctoral student in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in Dr. N.M. Holbrook's lab. Alex's research applied time series and spectral analysis to understanding management of stochastic risks and resource availability by plants.  His dissertation focused on accommodation of variation in water availability among rattans, climbing palms of the Old World tropics.  He also worked on the biomechanics of twining vines and developed a system for measuring sap flow in plants.

Born in Berkeley, CA, Alex grew up mostly in New York State.  He received a B.A. from The Evergreen State College, where he worked with Nalini Nadkarni on the ecology of bryophytes in Olympia, WA and Monteverde, Costa Rica.

Alex's thesis is titled, "Water Relations of Rattans. "  He has accepted a postdoctoral position at University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Tobias Baskin's lab.

Webpage: http://www.oeb.harvard.edu/faculty/holbrook/people/alex/Website/alex.htm

Damon Clark

School of Engineering & Applied Sciences

Email: daclark [at] post.harvard.edu

Damon Clark is a former doctoral student in the Physics Department. Under the direction of Professor Samuel, Damon studied the worm C. elegans as a model for discovering how neurons and neural networks encode specific behavioral algorithms. In particular, he looked at how worms respond to temperature changes and how they choose their crawling gate.

Although originally from sunny California, Damon has been enduring snowy winters for a few years now.He got his A.B. in Physics from Princeton in 2001 and arrived at the Harvard Physics Department after spending a year working in Africa.

Damon's thesis is titled, "Biophysical Analysis of Thermotactic Behavior in C. elegans." Damon has accepted a fall associate research position at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. In January 2008, he will begin a postdoctoral position studying vision in drosophila at Stanford University.

Website: http://worms.physics.harvard.edu

Willow Deluzio is a former doctoral student in Prof. George Whiteside's group. Willow studied the movement of motile bacteria near surfaces and in microchannels. Her research examined how the roughness, porosity, and viscoelasticity of surfaces affect the hydrodynamics of swimming cells in confined environments. By controlling the properties of microchannel walls, the direction of cell movement can be controlled. Willow collaborated with members of both Prof. Howard Berg's and Prof. Howard Stone's group.

Willow grew up in Littleton, Massachusetts. She received her B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in 1995. From 1995-2000 she worked at The DuPont Pharmaceuticals Company, where she developed the formulation and manufacturing process for new products.

Willow's thesis is titled, "Behavior of Bacteria Near Surfaces and in Microchannels."  She has accepted a position with Millennium Pharmaceuticals in Cambridge, MA

Brooke Flammang is a 4th year doctoral student in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.  She is studying the evolution of intrinsic tail muscle, tail fin structure, and tail fin shape modulation in swimming and maneuvering of fishes.  Her research combines high-speed video and electromyography to record muscle activity and fin movement.

Brooke grew up in Old Saybrook, CT.  She received her B.S. in Marine Biology from Fairleigh Dickinson University in NJ.  She then worked as a paramedic, rescue diver, and sixth grade Spanish and French teacher.  Brooke eventually succumbed to grad school and earned her M.S. in Marine Science from Moss Landing Marine Laboratories and California State University.

Website: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~flammang/

Evan Hohlfeld

School of Engineering & Applied Sciences

Evan Hohlfeld is a 7th year doctoral student in the Physics Department. Originally from Blue Bell, PA, a suburb of Philadelphia, Evan decided to flee the ice storms of '96 and '97, and went to Stanford where he graduated with a B.S. in Physics in 2001. Forgetting the lessons of his youth, he immediately returned to the northeast and enrolled in Harvard to study quantum mechanics. After two years of micro-Kelvin temperatures, Evan decided that, though he couldn't change the earth's weather patterns, he could at least do something about the temperature in his research and so he joined Prof. Mahadevan's group to work in biophysics. (That and he became intrigued by the beautiful experiments he learned people were doing at the cellular and sub-cellular level-length scales when many physical effects are comparable in magnitude.)

Currently Evan's work concerns the statistical physics of stiff, twisted polymers and polymer bundles, such as the beautiful braids of amyloid fibrils. Curiously, these systems can be understood through an analogy back to quantum mechanics.

Brian Langerhans
Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology
Email: langerhans [at] ou.edu

Brian Langerhans is a former doctoral student in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in Prof. Jonathan Losos’s lab. Brian's graduate work was in the evolution of phenotypic diversity and speciation.  He integrated biomechanics and ecology to generate testable predictions for the course of morphological and locomotor evolution in fishes.  His work centered on testing the role of natural selection in speciation and the general predictability of evolution in a group of small, livebearing fish in the genus Gambusia.

Brian grew up in Fort Worth, Texas.  He received a B.S. and M.S. from Texas A&M University, and a M.A. from Washington University in St. Louis.

Brian's thesis is titled, "Predation and evolutionary diversification in Gambusia fishes." In 2007, Brian Langerhans was awarded the RA Fisher Prize for best dissertation paper published in the journal, Evolution, in 2007 (Paper title: Langerhans, R.B., Gifford, M.E. and Joseph, E.O. "Ecological speciation in Gambusia fishes." Evolution 61(9):2056-2074)

Brian has accepted a post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Oklahoma Biological Station.

Heather Lynch

Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology

Email: hlynch [at] umd.edu

Heather Lynch is a former doctoral student in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in Prof. Paul Moorcroft's lab. Heather's research employed mathematical biology and spatial statistics to understand the landscape-level interactions between "contagious" forest disturbances, such as insect outbreaks and forest fires. Her dissertation focused on the question of insect outbreak-forest fire interactions, although she also engaged in several research projects aimed at using remote sensing technology to map out forest disturbance. Her research primarily focused on the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, where she collaborated with the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center as well as scientists at the National Park Service.

Heather grew up in Northern Virginia , where she attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. She received an A.B. from Princeton University in Physics with a certificate in Materials Science Engineering, and a M.A. from Harvard Uiversity in Physics prior to joining the OEB Department.

Heather's thesis is titled, "Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Insect-Fire Interactions."  She has accepted a postdoctoral faculty research associate position at the University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

Web page: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~hlynch/

Carlos Moreno is a 4th year doctoral student in the Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology. Carlos currently works at the Concord Field Station, under the guidance of Prof. Andrew Biewener, where he is developing a portable data logger system for recording whole-body accelerations of animals performing non-steady locomotor activities such as jumping, dodging, and turning.

Carlos was born and raised in Seattle, WA. He received a B.S. in Zoology from the University of Washington, in 2001. After finishing his graduation requirements, Carlos completed one and a half years of undergraduate research in Prof. Tom Daniel's biomechanics lab. He then moved to Baltimore where he spent two years teaching high school biology in the inner-city for Teach For America. In his spare time, Carlos teaches Argentine tango in the Boston area with his wife, Tova.

Anita Patel

Harvard School of Public Health

Email: aspatel [at] fas.harvard.edu

Herman Pontzer received his Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology. Herman is interested in linking funtional morphology to ecology in mammals, specifically hominoids. How does the musculoskeletal anatomy of an animal reflect its performance, ecological niche, and evolutionary history? His dissertation research used a combined modeling and experimental approach to test hypotheses regarding the role of leg length in determining energy costs and speeds during walking and running in humans and other terrestrial mammals. The relationship between leg length and locomotor performance will provide a useful line of evidence for testing hypotheses regarding the ranging and foraging behavior in hominids, and may provide a way to test ideas regarding selection pressures in early hominids and early Homo.

Herman is also involved in the ongoing excavations in the Lower Paleolithic site of Dmanisi in the Republic of Georgia. Fieldwork there provides an exciting oportunity to apply results from the lab to the fossil record. Dated to 1.8 mya, Dmanisi is a particularly interesting site as it's the earliest evidence of hominids (Homo ergaster) outside of Africa.

Herman's thesis is titled, " Locomotor energetics, ranging ecology, and the emergence of the genus /Homo/."  He has accepted a position at Washington University as Assistant Professor in Anthropology.

Webpage: http://artsci.wustl.edu/~hpontzer/Pontzer.htm

Chris Richards is a 6th year doctoral student in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.  Under the joint advising of Andrew Biewener and George Lauder, Chris is using physiological approaches to understand the biomechanics of swimming.  Specifically, how do muscles inside an aquatic creature (such as a fish or a frog) transmit propulsive forces to the water?   To address this question, Chris uses in vivo and in vitro techniques to directly measure forces and motion generated by hindlimb muscles in the S. African clawed frog ( Xenopus laevis).

Chris Richards was born in Poughkeepsie NY.  He gained B.A.'s in Biology and in Violin Performance at Oberlin College-Oberlin Conservatory ( Oberlin, OH) in 1998.

After graduation, Chris worked as a lab technician in muscle physiology and biomedical research labs before entering graduate school in 2003.  Outside of lab, Chris is involved in several musical groups, including the Longwood Symphony Orchestra.

Neil Thomas Roach
Department of Anthropology
Email: ntroach [at] fas.harvard.edu

Neil Roach is a 3rd year doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology. He is interested in the evolution of human behavior and the environmental and physiological forces that shaped it through time. Particularly, he is interested the morphology of the shoulder in relation to throwing and tool production. As a member of Prof. Daniel Lieberman’s Skeletal Biology lab, Neil abuses his good-natured friends by attaching them to various pieces of scientific equipment and making them do all sorts of silly things. He also actively participates in archeological and paleontological fieldwork in the Kenyan Rift Valley, investigating landscape usage by our pre-human ancestors and paleoenvironmental reconstruction.

Before coming to Harvard, Neil received his BA in Anthropology from the University of Connecticut, a small state of which he has been a lifelong resident and for which he has an unnatural amount of pride.

Website: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~skeleton/roach.html

Enrique Robertson Rojas

School of Engineering & Applied Sciences

Email: errojas [at] fas.harvard.edu

Marita Sheldon is a 3rd year doctoral student in Biological Science in Public Health. Marita's research interests are cellular and cytoskeletal mechanics. She is interested in how physiological and pathological changes within mammalian cells affect their ability to interact mechanically, and thereby functionally, with their surroundings. Marita plans to apply the techniques developed in the laboratory of Dr. Jeffry Fredberg to probe both intracellular mechanics, such as cell stiffness and cytoskeletal remodeling, as well as extracellular mechanics, such as traction forces on the extracellular matrix. Particular cell systems of interest include epithelial cells growing in a 3D environment, and activated monocytes or macrophages within a fluid environment.

Orignially from Scotia, NY, Marita received her B.S. in Materials Science & Engineering, with a Biomedical Engineering concentration, from Michigan State University in 2004.

Frank James Stewart
Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
Email: fstewart [at] oeb.harvard.edu

Frank Stewart is a 5th year doctoral student in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology.  He is interested in the physical processes impacting genetic diversification in marine bacterial populations.  Specifically, he works with Prof. Colleen Cavanaugh studying the coevolution of symbiotic bacteria and giant clams (Vesicomyidae) at deep-sea hydrothermal vents.

Frank grew up in Reno, NV.  He received a B.A. in Biology from Middlebury College in Vermont.  He then went on to complete a M.S. at the University of Nevada, Reno, where he studied the microbial ecology of Antarctic sea ice.

Eric Tytell received his Ph.D. from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. His main research focus is in the biomechanics of locomotion in fishes, from muscle mechanics to fluid dynamics. One major focus of his thesis has been examining how the shape of different fishes affects how they swim.

Eric's thesis is titled, "Experimental hydrodynamics of swimming fishes: Why body shape matters."

David Vader
School of Engineering & Applied Sciences
Email: vader [at] fas.harvard.edu

David Vader is a 5th year doctoral student in Prof. Dave Weitz's soft condensed matter group, where he is trying to understand how cells interact with their local environment in 3D systems during migratory and contractile activity, looking at it primarily from a mechanical point of view. David spent some time tracking cell motion in 3D collagen gels and studying their motion patterns. He wishes to relate variations in cell behavior to local mechanical changes in the environment and therefore has started doing more collagen fiber imaging. He is also looking at sparsely plated cells in collagen to see how they interact with each other and with their environment at various densities, sometimes forming "supernetworks" of bundled collagen fibers. One of David's goals is to apply some of the results and knowledge acquired from the above experiments to understand how brain tumor cells invade the surrounding tissue.

David Vader was born and raised in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he received his M.E. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, majoring in applied physics. He moved to Boston three years ago with his wife Brehana and is now the proud father of a son, Milo.

Michael Weidman
School of Engineering & Applied Sciences
Email: mweidman [at] fas.harvard.edu

Michael Weidman is a 4th year doctoral student in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. His current research interests are solid-fluid interactions in systems inspired by human and animal voice production organs.  Michael hopes to explain the nonlinear behavior (period doubling bifurcations, chaotic transitions) evident in many animal sounds using a simple model that is a bit more realistic than the "lumped parameter" models currently in use

Michael is originally from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He attended Harvard College where he received an A.B. degree in Physics.  Michael then attended the University of Cambridge for one year, where he read part III of the maths tripos.

James Wheeler
Department of Organismic & Evolutionary Biology
Email: wheeler [at] fas.harvard.edu

James Wheeler is a 3rd year doctoral student in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in Prof. Holbrook's lab.  He is interested in xylem evolution and the competing constraints of fluid conducting efficiency, drought tolerance, and structural support. 

James received a B.S. in biology from the University of Utah in 2003, where he subsequently worked as a lab technician studying xylem structure.

Shelten Yuen
School of Engineering & Applied Sciences
Email: sgyuen [at] fas.harvard.edu