My Research Team
Faculty Advisors/Collaborators
Dr. David Hu
Dr. Hu is currently my faculty advisor at Georgia Tech. He is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biology with an Adjunct Position in the School of Physics at Georgia Tech.
Dr. Joe Mendelson
Dr. Joe Mendelson is currently the Director of Research at Zoo Atlanta and a professor of Biological Sciences at Georgia Tech. Dr. Mendelson assists with all Zoo research including elephants, gorillas, and snakes.
Robert Wallace
Robert Wallace is currently a GTRI researcher that assists in the two courses that I teach including HumaniTech and GaTech4Wildlife. Robert helps oversee projects with connections in 5 different continents.
Dr. Joy Reidenberg
Dr. Joy Reidenberg is the expert on elephant trunk anatomy that we collaborate with. She currently is a faculty member at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinah in New York and helps with many different elephant trunk dissection experiments we have performed.
Dr. Claire Higgins
Dr. Claire Higgins is a faculty member of Bioengineering at Imperial College London that has assisted with morphological and compositional analysis of elephant trunk skin and hair. She is an expert on Vibrissal hair and scar tissue and has assisted with experiments on elephant trunk tissue.
Dr. Craig McGowan
Dr. Craig McGowan is the foremost expert in bear biomechanics. I work with Dr. McGowan to understand how bears are able to climb and walk so effortlessly. This is especially unique considering how large they are compared to other scansorial species.
Graduate Collaborators
Ben Seleb
Ben Seleb is currently a PhD student in Saad Bhamla' s lab at Georgia Tech. Ben is the TA for the GaTech4Wildlife Course at Georgia Tech and helps find new projects and lead new projects. He is an expert on conservation technology and is working towards expanding the scope of what we know how technology can help stop the sixth mass extinction on our planet.
Current Undergraduate Researchers
Sophia
Sophia is currently an undergraduate Biology student at Brown University. Her project is examining the micro-structures inside elephant skin.
Madeline
Madeline is an undergraduate at Georgia Tech studying how the elephant trunk obeys conservation of volume during elongation.
John
John is an undergraduate student at UTSA that is working on an REU project focused on understanding the force-displacement relationship of the elephant trunk during elongation.
Daniel
Daniel is a Computer Science researcher from University of Florida working on an REU to work on constructing a new UI to examine tensile properties of non-linear skin
Ajay
Ajay is an undergraduate student at Georgia Tech studying the relationship between force and extension of the elephant trunk.
Anais
Anais is leading a research effort to understand how we can manage human-wildlife conflict in urban ecology settings focusing on fox populations at Georgia Tech.
Xander
Xander is an undergraduate student creating bio-inspired elephant trunk skin to help with gripping and protection.
Alex
Alex is studying how to create new types of detection devices to use a wetted wall cyclone to detect COVID-19 and other particles
Maggie
Maggie is an undergraduate student at Georgia Tech studying the difference between elephant neuro-perception of reaching tasks and the difference between sight and tough for precision reaching.
Hadley
Hadley is currently an undergraduate student working on understanding how we can design new enrichment methods to improve the lives of endangered species currently in captivity through technology for wildlife.
Isabella
Isabella is currently an undergraduate student at Georgia Tech studying how we can mitigate the feral hogs in the state of Georgia from destroying endangered plants and peanut farms.
Undergraduate Research Alumnus
Lauren
Lauren is an undergraduate at Georgia Tech that studied bear biolocomotion.
Cata
Cata is an undergraduate at Georgia Tech that studied elephant trunk elongation.
Alex
Alex is an undergraduate student at tech that studied elephant trunk movement around obstacles.
Yunshu
Yunshu is an undergraduate at Georgia Tech that created bio-inspired robots based on the trunk's movement.
Sara
Sara is an undergraduate student researching elephant cognition and the difference in the visual and olfactory precision during reaching tasks.
Julia
Julia is currently an undergraduate at Georgia Tech studying new ways to develop conservation technology.
Ben
Ben is an undergraduate student working on understand how intestines' can shape different materials inside the body.
Emily
Emily is currently an undergraduate student at Georgia Tech studying the elephant trunk skin and how we can create models based on the skin's movement.
Concilia
Concilia is an undergraduate at Georgia Tech that researched elephant neuromechanics of reaching
Wenxin (Rose)
Rose is an undergraduate at Georgia Tech studying bear biomechanics in both walking and climbing of all bear species.
Andrew
Andrew is an undergraduate at Georgia Tech that researched creating a bio-inspired detection device.