Education & Research

Education

BSc (Marine Biology), University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2004

MSc (Biology), St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, NS, Canada, 2006

PhD candidate (Organismic and Evolutionary Biology), Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2006 - present

Research

Questions that really get my brain going involve viewing and understanding dynamic and complex systems in terms of their mechanically integrated parts. That is, my research interests include biomechanics, functional morphology, and ecological mechanics, particularly in aquatic organisms.  

So far, most of my research has been in aquatic locomotion. Since starting my PhD in Dr. George Lauder’s lab at Harvard University in September 2006, these are the kinds of things I’ve been thinking about:

• In the interactions between a swimming body and the external fluid, what has the potential to be tuned or display resonance?

• Do swimming animals modulate their morphologies or movement patterns to exploit these mechanical phenomena? What can they gain by doing this (energy savings, increased performance…)?  

• Are there situations where it would be advantageous to not tune swimming activity?

Other research...

For my MSc, I studied lobster locomotion in Dr. Edwin DeMont's Comparative Biomechanics lab at St. Francis Xavier University. Lobsters have a series of paddle-shaped appendages (the pleopods) on their abdomens that they use to generate water currents, and I was interested in their hydrodynamics and locomotory function. Using a quantitative flow visualization technique (particle image velocimetry, PIV) and a mechanical lobster model to characterize pleopod-generated flows and their forces, we found that the lobster’s beating pleopods are capable of producing a strong rearward jet that could assist walking in benthic habitats.  

I received a BSc in Marine Biology at the University of British Columbia. During my time there, I was fortunate enough to undertake biomechanics research in the Animal Locomotion lab with Dr. Robert Blake on the kinematics of swimming in the bichir (Polypterus sp.), and with Dr. Doug Fudge and Dr. John Gosline in the Biomaterials lab on the ecological function of hagfish slime (which we tested with a "slime vacuum" -- see below and here: Lim, J., Fudge, D. S., Levy, N. and Gosline, J. M. (2006). Hagfish slime ecomechanics: testing the gill-clogging hypothesis. J. Exp. Biol. 209, 702-710. )

...More information can be found in my CV

{Home}