This award will help defray travel expenses for participants in a symposium and workshop at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in Austin, Texas, in January 2020. Plants and animals each have unique solutions for mechanical problems, including sticking to surfaces, folding, dispersal, and responding to mechanical loads. Several of these solutions have been sources for bio-inspiration, such as self-cleaning surfaces inspired by the lotus leaf. The symposium brings together plant and animal researchers that tackle similar problems in different systems under the unifying theme of "biological solutions to mechanical problems that might lead to engineering applications." A diverse group of researchers will exchange ideas that cross scales at an exciting frontier of trans-disciplinary research. As part of this symposium, conference participants will have the opportunity to consult with science communication experts to showcase their research to the general public and other stakeholders through effective press releases and social media posts. Pre-conference and on-site meetings among the symposium presenters will facilitate collaborations and preparation of scientific manuscripts. This symposium will result in the publication of original research papers, research reviews, and perspectives in a special issue of a scientific journal. The special journal issue will be complemented by a lesson plan for college instructors to facilitate the use of symposium special issues as textbooks or supplementary instructional material in their courses.
Plants and animals evolved often complex solutions to the same physical problems. Transferring those solutions into biomimetic materials and processes comes with new challenges, such as scalability. To understand and transfer biological solutions to physical problems, an inter-disciplinary approach that combines research in biology, engineering, and physics has been used. A road less travelled is to explicitly compare the evolved solutions of animals and plants, as well as the experimental approaches used by researchers in these fields, which are two goals of the symposium. The symposium will foster intellectual exchange among scientists who share a given research question, yet address it from different angles, using different model systems and approaches, with a focus on the topics of adhesion, locomotion and dispersal, and response to mechanical loads. The symposium offers a synthesis of ideas while highlighting the work of diverse, emerging investigators from the US and abroad. The symposium will include a workshop on public outreach, which will help scientists to promote their research to the public. Additional engagement opportunities will be provided during online breakout discussions and networking sessions. Professional networking and collaborations will be facilitated as scientists produce career-relevant deliverables, such as scientific publications (original articles, a more historical review article and a forward-looking perspective article focusing on remaining challenges and urgent areas of inquiry) and products that support dissemination to the public (press releases, blog posts, podcasts, social media posts). Additionally, the symposium organizers will collaborate with educational experts to develop an educational module based on using the symposium publications as a textbook or textbook supplement in courses on comparative physiology, comparative biomechanics, biomimetics, and integrative biology.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
