Various data from our recent bone loading paper in JEB have been uploaded on Dryad. These include data on bone stresses, safety factors, Vickers hardnesses, peak ground reaction forces, moment arms, and kinematics from the humerus and femur of Ambystoma tigrinum during terrestrial locomotion.
Our data package is available at Dryad: http://datadryad.org/resource/doi:10.5061/dryad.7f1j1 The accompanying paper is available as an Advance Online Access article at JEB: http://jeb.biologists.org/content/early/2015/11/20/jeb.125799 If you have any questions on either research product, please email me at skawano<at>nimbios<dot>org. Thank you!
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At the end of the 2016 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting, I was officially appointed as the Representative for students and post-docs in the Division of Comparative Biomechanics. This term will be for three years, and I can't wait to give back to the society that has given so much to me while I was a student. SICB is one of the most student-friendly professional societies, and spent over $200,000 in 2015 alone to support students to conduct their research and present it at the annual meeting. Please feel free to email me if you have ideas about how to improve the student experience through SICB!
Public outreach is one of the most important conduits to connect science and society, instilling a greater sense of appreciation for science and promoting biological literacy. It is also such a rewarding aspect of my job. Working with the public allows me to get others excited about science, share my research with new inquiring minds, and encourage youth to pursue higher education. It's really a win-win situation!
I am happy to announce that I have been invited to speak at the 2016 University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Darwin Day! My talk is entitled, "Breathing life into fossils: living fishes and salamanders provide clues to the evolutionary invasion of land", and will demonstrate how biomechanics serves as a crucial tool in bringing fossils back to life. No, not in a Jurassic Park sort of way. Rather, to use what we know about living animals to model how fossil animals might have lived. This will be one of the kick-off lectures to the keynote address by Neil Shubin! More information about the 2016 UTK Darwin Day can be found here: http://darwindaytn.org/. Our new paper on limb bone loading of the tiger salamander has been featured by the following news sources:
Our new paper in The Journal of Experimental Biology is now available online! http://jeb.biologists.org/content/early/2015/11/20/jeb.125799
In this paper, we investigate intrinsic factors that contribute to functional diversity within the musculoskeletal system of the tiger salamander, a modern analog for early stem tetrapods. I am pleased to announce that the Journal of Experimental Biology has accepted our manuscript entitled "Comparative limb bone loading in the humerus and femur of the tiger salamander Ambystoma tigrinum: testing the 'mixed-chain' hypothesis for skeletal safety factors" for publication! Our research was completed through a great collaboration that integrated the strengths of D. Ross Economy and Marian "Molly" Kennedy from Materials Science and Engineering, Delphine Dean from Bioengineering, and Rick Blob from Biological Sciences. Thank you to all of my fantastic collaborators, our helpful reviewers and editor, and the many colleagues and students who helped us bring this research to fruition.
This work was submitted as a research chapter for my dissertation at Clemson University, and was presented at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Meeting last January where I was a finalist for the Division of Comparative Biomechanics Best Student Talk Competition! The abstract for this talk was published in Integrative and Comparative Biology and is available here: http://www.sicb.org/meetings/2015/schedule/abstractdetails.php?id=211. The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB) meeting will be held in Portland from January 3-7-2016, and will be packed with some exciting research. It's been a productive year and I am happy to be part of four presentations that encompass various topics in biomechanics, evolutionary biology, and computational biology:
Hope to see you in Portland!
Since my life is pretty much consumed by R, I've created a page to organize and share some of the R Resources that I've developed or found useful. This page will be updated periodically. Enjoy!
I received notification that I was selected to participate in the Society for Integrative Biology (SICB) Best Student Presentation competition, under the Division of Comparative Biomechanics (DCB)! What a great honor to represent DCB! Thank you to the DCB program for giving me such a wonderful opportunity to share the remainder of my dissertation during my last student talk.
See you all in West Palm Beach! |