Entries by AWP

Stability vs. Change: Identifying the Key Questions in Animal Physiology

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15 – 19 March 2020 Hopkins Marine Station, Monterey California Instructors Mark Denny, Stanford University Tom Daniel, University of Washington Manu Prakash, Stanford University Mike Kearney, University of Melbourne Kakani Katija, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute Alejandro Rico-Guevara, University of Washington Limit 15 Participants – including organismal biologists, engineers, applied mathematicians and modelers. Preference will […]

OSyM Website Launch

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Welcome to our new OSyM website! Explore these pages for information about the RCN and its goals, as well as opportunities for RNC participants to connect, collaborate, participate in workshops, symposia, and research exchanges. Join OSyM to post your profile and research interests so that potential collaborators in organismal biology, engineering and modeling can connect […]

Introducing OSyM Leadership

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Principal Investigators Dr. Dianna Padilla, Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, (phenotypic plasticity) Dr. Kendra Greenlee, Biology, North Dakota State University (physiology) Dr. Dianna Padilla (PI), Ecology and Evolution, Stony Brook University, (phenotypic plasticity), and Dr. Kendra Greenlee (CoPI), Biology, North Dakota State University (physiology) are the leaders of the OSyM RCN. Padilla was the […]

Welcome to OSyM

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The goal of this RCN is to provide avenues for organismal biologists and modeling experts to develop necessary collaborations to improve our predictive ability to understand organismal structure and function.  This RCN is also designed to provide researchers with the training needed to pursue new and exciting ways to explore cutting-edge questions in this emerging, but vital area of research on how animals balance maintaining stability while accommodating change. Learn more About OSyM.

Bio-inspiration from micro-fluidics in the insect tracheal system

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Participants
Art Woods, University of Montana, organismal biologist
Shahriar Afkami, New Jersey Institute of Technology, computational and mathematical modeling
Kendra Greenlee, North Dakota State University, organismal biologist

Summary
The respiratory system of insects is evolved to deal with water in the tracheae. Our short term goals are to develop the model for fluid movement and prepare the first manuscript stemming from this project. Our long-term goals are to 1) understand the surface properties of the tracheal system that make it amenable to liquid movement, 2) identify the routes of liquid movement through the tracheal system, and 3) determine the mechanism of liquid movement using x-ray imaging.

Please contact Kendra Greenlee kendra.greenlee@ndsu.edu for more information about this research exchange.

Building predictive models for the development of respiratory function

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Participants
Noah Cowan, Johns Hopkins University, engineer and organismal biologist
Kendra Greenlee, North Dakota State University, organismal biologist
Kristi Montooth, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, organismal biologist

Summary
Greenlee, Montooth & Helm (2014) made the case that the development of insect respiratory structures and the underlying metabolism is an excellent system to investigate how organisms walk the tightrope between stability and change. Regulatory feedback is certainly working to maintain stability and elicit change in this system. The challenge, however, is that the timescale of this feedback is much slower relative to the nearly instantaneous feedback control that Dr. Cowan has been quantitatively and predictively modeling using control theory (Cowan et al. 2014).

Drs. Cowan, Greenlee and Montooth propose a workshop to envision what data would need to be collected to use the control theory framework to build predictive models of how the processes underlying the ontogeny of metabolic rate are regulated in response to the environment to maintain respiratory performance during insect development.