Jointly hosted by the Department of Bioengineering and the Institute for Security Science & Technology, this seminar will be given by Professor Tom Daniel from the Department of Biology, University of Washington.

Abstract

Professor Tom Daniel is the Director of the US Air Force Center of Excellence on Nature-Inspired Flight Technologies and Ideas (NIFTI), which aims to reveal principles of design and architecture in natural systems in order to inspire the next generation of autonomous systems capable of flight in complex environments.  NIFTI’s multi-university multi-disciplinary team of researchers brings expertise in engineering, neuroscience, animal behaviour and computational approaches to collectively “reverse engineer” the processes by which natural systems accomplish challenging flight related behaviours.  Tom will provide an overview of NIFTI and will also focus on his recent research in advancing our understanding of insect flight dynamics, with a particular emphasis on multimodal sensing in flight control.

Biography

Tom Daniel holds the University of Washington Komen Endowed Chair and is Professor in the Department of Biology and the Graduate Program on Neuroscience. He received his PhD from Duke University and was the Bantrell Fellow in Engineering Sciences at Caltech. He is co-Director of the UW Institute of Neuroengineering, the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the UW Distinguished Teaching Award and the UW Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award. He is on the Board of Directors of the Allen Institute of Brain Sciences and Board of Editors for Science. His research focusses on control of movement in animals, from sensory information processing to motor programming to the physics of animal motion, from molecules to moving moths.