BIOL 472: Fall 2025
We are back this fall, the first time in 5 years, in a new building, back in person, an official course number, and a new generation of students. Stayed tuned as I plan for our Fall 2025 semester.
The Organismal Form & Function lab is a Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE). TO find out more about the course you can read our paper or view our CUREnet entry. The goal of the course is to give student’s authentic research experiences focused on organismal form, function and performance. Student’s will develop their own hypotheses related to biomechanics and whole-ogranismal performance and use high speed and time lapse cameras to collect their data and test their hypotheses. The first half of the course will have lectures based on animal performance, kinematics and biomechanics, while the labs will focus on high speed cinematography, digitization and obtaining kinematics. We will also have field trips to collect local invertebrates to use as our subjects. In the second half of the course, the lecture portion will be replaced with more “lab meeting” exercises, including paper presentations and discussion, while the lab portion will be time for students to collect and analyze their data.
Fall 2025 will be the third iteration of the course, back in person. I am taking lessons I learned from our hybrid version in 2020 but mostly going back to the original course in Fall 2018 to try and start fresh.
There are very few organismal CURE’s, and I have drawn inspiration from some of my recent work on praying mantis feeding and other courses such as the Friday Harbor Labs Fish Swimming Course I took back in 2005! I will be posting course materials, updates from the course, and student videos throughout the semester. So stay tuned and wish us luck as we embark on this journey.
