Division of Comparative Biomechanics (DCB): 2008 Spring Newsletter

In this newsletter:

• Message from the Chair
• Message from the Program Officer
• Message from the Secretary
• Minutes of the January 2008 Business Meeting

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Message from the Chair

Robert Full

Just over a year ago we created a new division for the study of comparative biomechanics. We adopted a set of bylaws. We held our first elections in 2007. All the interim officers we elected to assume office at the January meeting. These include: me, Robert Full as chair, Frank Fish as program officer and Miriam Ashley-Ross as secretary. We thank the nominees and the membership for your participation in the elections. Nearly 75% of the members voted. Gabriel Rivera is our new divisional representative to the Student/Postdoctoral Affairs Committee.

We had 198 join the Division last year. This year we have a total of 349 members!

The San Antonio Meeting was remarkably successful. DCB sponsored three symposia. There were 19 sessions related to biomechanics with 99 contributed papers and 53 posters. We look forward to Boston next year.

I attended the Biological Approaches for Engineering meeting at the University of Southampton on 17th to 19th of March. The meeting was small and of very high quality. Many of our European colleagues gave plenary talks - J. Rayner, C. Ellington, R. Blake, J. Vincent along with our own Steve Vogel. The meeting was supported by the new journal Bioinspiration & Biomimetics (http://www.iop.org/EJ/journal/bioinsp). The editor-in-chief Robert Allen is interested in being associated with our new division. I would appreciate your thoughts.

The North American Congress on Biomechanics (NACOB). NACOB 2008 will be held from Tuesday, August 5 to Saturday, August 9, 2008 on the Central Campus of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A. NACOB 2008 is the combined Annual Meetings of the American Society of Biomechanics and the Canadian Society for Biomechanics. This combined meeting is held once every six years to promote scientific exchange and to foster collaboration among those interested in all aspects of biomechanics. The new president of the American Society of Biomechanics is Rodger Kram. He made a specific appeal to us concerning a closer relationship in their recent newsletter. "First off, I am determined to grow the participation of biologists in the society. One way is to reach out to the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB). Research interests at SICB span the range of organisms on the planet from ants to zebras and from amoebas to xylem. I encourage you to google "SICB biomechanics" and check it out. They provide a list of their members and institutional affiliation. You probably have a local biomechanics colleague and don't even know it. Drop them an email, invite them to your lab, have a cup of coffee, exchange ideas and encourage them to join ASB or attend our meeting. Or maybe put together a proposal for a regional joint ASB-SICB conference. Bob Full of UC Berkeley is the chair of biomechanics for SICB and we are working on a plan to encourage ASB and SICB members to attend each other's meetings." Send me your thoughts. If you would like to volunteer to lead these efforts please contact me.

The Annual Scientific Meeting of SEB is July 6th - 10th in Marseille, France, 2008 at the Parc Chanot Conference Centre. There is a wonderful symposium on Integrating the Mechanics and Energetics of Locomotion organized by Richard L. Marsh. There have also been requests to have a joint meeting with SEB. Again, send me your thoughts. If you would like to volunteer to lead these efforts please contact me.

IUPS is in Kyoto, Japan on July 27 - August 1, 2009. As suggested last year, DCB could come up with a satellite symposium to coincide with the meeting. If you would like to volunteer to lead these efforts please contact me.

The 16th Congress of the European Society of Biomechanics is to be held July 6th - 9th, 2008 in Lucerne, Switzerland. I will be presenting and will report on possible links to this society.

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Message from the Program Officer

Frank Fish

The program associated with the Division of Comparative Biomechanics (DCB) at the 2008 SICB was extremely successful and displayed the strength of the new division. Indeed, there were problems in just being able to choose for all the concurrent papers that were delivered by members of the DCB. There were contributed papers on running, swimming, flying, clinging, jumping, feeding, growth, mechanics, biomaterials, and adhesives. The crown achievement was the DCB-sponsored symposium "Going with the Flow: Ecomorphological Variation Across Aquatic Flow," which was organized by Grabriel Rivera and Richard Blob. Steve Vogel started it off and Mimi Koehl concluded. DCB also helped to sponsor the symposia "Electromyography Interpretation and Limitations in Functional Analyses of Musculoskeletal Systems" and "Aeroecology: Probing and Modeling the Atmosphere-The Next Frontier." DCB pooled its collective resources with the Division of Vertebrate Morphology to have a "kegger" for a social, which went extremely well.

I would like you to think about possible symposia to have at future meetings. The strength of this new division rests on the participation of the members of DCB and the symposia that are sponsored. If you have an idea for a symposium, please contact me and we can work out the specifics. There is also opportunity to have symposia presented at the next meeting as a Late-Breaking Symposium. Although these symposia will be limited in number, it is a mechanism to have a forum for fast developing and important ideas.

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Message from the Secretary

Miriam Ashley-Ross

What a great meeting in San Antonio! Not only did our Division sponsor three excellent symposia, but we also inaugurated the Best Student Paper competitions quite successfully - we had 23 entries, spanning the spectrum from the microscopic to fully organismal. Here are the winners:

Best Student Oral Presentation

Anne Peattie, University of California Berkeley, Effect of Variation in Length and Width on Single Seta Force in Geckos

Best Student Poster

Kevin Miklasz, Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University, Pacific Grove, A Low-Reynolds number conundrum: How fast should diatoms sink?

Congratulations to Anne and Kevin! They have set the bar high for future years!

Further congratulations go to Sheila Patek, DCB member and this year's recipient of the Bartholomew Award!

It's also not too soon to start making plans for the Boston meeting in 2009 and beyond. DCB is sponsoring one symposium for Boston, Sensory Biomechanics, organized by Matt McHenry and Sanjay Sane. We want to continue making a strong showing as a Division, so please consider organizing a symposium for a future meeting. There are some specific tips on obtaining NSF funding for symposia in the Minutes of the Business Meeting.

We are establishing a Researchers Database for the Division. Please e-mail me a short description of your research, along with a nifty picture related to it, for inclusion in the online database. It's a great tool for attracting potential students, and only takes a couple of minutes - most of us already have websites, and it's simple to copy the most salient points from that, and send them along.

Have a great summer!

Minutes of the January 2008 Business Meeting