Information for Prospective Students
Note: Since I have retired I will no longer be admitting Ph.D. students to work in my laboratory. Links to other researchers in the general area of physical biology organisms are available here.
Students receive superior training for future research careers when they are allowed considerable independence in their Ph.D. studies. Rather than being handed part of a larger project, it is important for a student to identify a key unsolved problem based on a critical review of the literature and then design and execute the experiments that will provide a definitive answer.
As a result, the research topics of my Ph.D. students have been diverse, including investigations of the mechanisms of adhesion in invertebrates, the role of the tensile properties of water in nature, the sensitivity of echinoderms to polarized skylight and its potential role in their behavior and ecology, the structure and function of peristaltic locomotion in holothurians, the ontogeny of squid mantle structure and function and its implications for jet locomotion, molting in crustaceans and the use of hydrostatic skeletal support following shedding of the rigid skeleton, the structure and function of a novel joint mechanism in invertebrates, the effects of size on hydrostatic skeletons, and the evolution of obliquely striated muscle.