Lentink Lab Messages | Archive

Credit: Chris 73

Congrats Dr. Chin and Dr. Deetjen!

Diana Chin and Mark Deetjen successfully defended and submitted their wonderful PhD theses. Diana advanced our understanding of how foraging birds fly effectively over short distances in arboreal environments. Her biomechanical research uncovered how birds use terrestrial and aerodynamic force vectoring to visually guide their flight. She also helped uncover strategies birds use to land and takeoff from complex surfaces. She developed the first 2D aerodynamic force platform to measure the lift and drag birds generate in flight for the first time in vivo. Her research shows birds repurpose lift and drag in unconventional ways to enable takeoff and landing. Mark developed a new automated 3D imaging technique to quantify the deformation of 3D surfaces at high-speed, including birds in free flight. His single shot algorithm maximizes reconstruction framerate. His automated calibration algorithm for simultaneously using multiple highspeed structured-light projectors and cameras enables and simplifies the use of this state-of-the-art imaging technique across applications. Using these techniques and collaborating with Diana Chin and Bret Tobalske, he reconstructed the most accurate aerodynamic workloop of flight muscles till date.  


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