Meet OUR LAB MEMBERS
Past, current, and emerging
CURRENT MEMBERS
ABOUT CHRIS
My current research explores locomotor behaviour of running, climbing and hopping animals, including insects, lizards, mammals, birds and humans.
My research is conducted in both lab and field environments, to understand the mechanisms of how animals move in their natural environment.
ABOUT JOJO'S
PROJECT
PhD Thesis title: Bio-inspired robotics and robotics-inspired biology: Understanding the evolution of biomechanics in climbing and jumping locomotion and
transferring new design principles onto an industrial climbing robot.
ABOUT OAK' PROJECT
Sports-watches for Animals?
Seamlessly decode fine-scale behaviors from raw accelerometry data of any animal species through a single universal machine learning workflow. The goal of my PhD is to design a versatile unsupervised foundation model that can be easily and rapidly tailored to specific species with a fraction of the training data currently required. By offering a user-focused, out-of-the-box software, the need for large volumes of data and laborious design, training, and testing of individual animal models is eliminated, allowing biologists to spend less time sorting data, more time making breakthroughs.
PAST MEMBERS
Hendrick Beck
Intern
Climbing robot (3rd Gen.)\.
Now a PhD student in London in the Evolutionary Biomechanics Lab at the Imperial Collage.
Ashley
Miller
SRP
Jumping insect biomechanics
Jordan DiCicco
Honours
Unrevealing beast mode: What does a perentie do when we are not looking
Jasmin Rayne
Honours
The life of a possum
COLLABORATORS
Taylor Dick (UQ)
Taylor Dick is a Senior Lecturer in The School of Biomedical Sciences. Taylor is particularly interested in the neuromuscular and biomechanical mechanisms that underlie healthy and diseased locomotor function. Taylor has cooperated in many studies including lizard and kangaroo locomotion.
CSIRO
We work with CSIRO, Data61, to apply our results from lizard and robot climbing dynamics onto an quadrupedal industrial climbing robot.
Hidden Vale
A local wildlife centre run in partnership with the University of Queensland and the Turner Family Foundation. The institution strives to enable research that develops next-generation wildlife management practices and investigates novel solutions to conservation issues.
Australia Zoo
Robert Irwin and Kate Berry helped us run Komodo dragons over force plaits.
Wildlife HQ
A local wildlife centre…
Evolutionary Biomechanics Lab
A close collaborator – the Evolutionary Biomechanics Lab from the Imperial Collage in London. We have a high exchange of knowledge, and cooperate on multiple projects.
Walter Federle
Walter from Cambridge, UK, collaborates in the jumping insect biomechanics study.
Jan-Henning Dirks
Jan-Henning Dirks is the main contact from the University of Applied Sciences in Bremen, where many of the students in this lab join from to work on the climbing robots. Jan-Henning is also a collaborator in the Jumping Insect project, providing access to a MicroCT scanner to scan the insects adhesives.
John Hutchinson
A collaborator from the Royal Vetenary College in London, UK
Peter Bishop
Peter Bishop together with Chris developed the method pipeline for building musco-skeletal models of animals and simulate their locomotions with computer models. He is now at the Harvard university in Camebridge, Massachusetts.