Professor Daniel Goldman's Complex Rheology And Biomechanics Lab in the School of Physics at The Georgia Institute of Technology (Phone: 4043854548)

 

*Sarah Sharpe is awarded the Best Paper Award for the Georgia Tech Bioengineering Graduate Program 2013 for her paper "Environmental interaction influences muscle activation strategy during sand-swimming in the sandfish lizard Scincus scincus"

 

Our research addresses problems in nonequilibrium systems that involve interaction of physical and biological matter with complex materials (like granular media) that can flow when stressed. For example, how do organisms like lizards, crabs, and cockroaches generate appropriate musculoskeletal dynamics to scurry rapidly over substrates like sand, bark, leaves, and grass. The study of novel biological and physical interactions with complex media can also lead to the discovery of principles that govern the physics of the media. We integrate laboratory and field studies of organism biomechanics with systematic laboratory studies of physics of the substrates, create models of the substrates, and create mathematical and physical (robot) models of the organisms.