Science of Bird Nests (and other bioengineering topics) - presented by Rutgers Camden Professor Hunter King 

Why look to biology for engineering inspiration? Many challenges, inherent to survival, are common to diverse plant and animal species. While humans derive and creatively apply abstract principles to their problems, evolution has had millions of years to mix and match physical mechanisms through natural selection to get the job done, often in ways that wouldn't occur to us.

Here, Dr. King will present two examples of animal engineering that are of current interest in the lab:  how birds mechanically synthesize and tune an aggregate material from elements with disparate properties; and how termite mound architecture harnesses fluctuations in ambient temperature to collectively breathe.

 Central to each strategy is the useful exploitation of phenomena human engineers traditionally avoid: disorder and noise.

Assistant Professor

B.S. University of Massachusetts, Amherst, M.S. Bogazici University, Istanbul, PhD University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Research Interests:

Mechanics of structures engineered by plants and animals; non-equilibrium and soft matter physics; open-source instrumentation for table-top experiment and field measurement.