UC Connect: Inspired by Nature: Engineering as an Art Form

Inspired by Nature: Engineering as an Art Form
Beauty in design goes well beyond architecture and ornamentation. It is found in all fields of engineering and has even launched an entirely new field of biologically inspired design called biomimicry.
Biomimicry studies how nature solves problems, such as flight and low-drag swimming, and applies those principles to engineered solutions. This field of study has brought about incredible breakthroughs – microscopic cameras that can “swarm” into a larger image, swimsuits that have the texture of shark skin, and robots that can climb windows or fly like butterflies.
In this upcoming public lecture, University of Canterbury mechanical and biomedical engineer Dr Deborah Munro, will talk about her work designing everything from robotic dinosaurs to orthopaedic implants to prostheses and how studying natural movement informed her best solutions.
Dr Munro was one of the design engineers for the Jurassic Park Ride at Universal Studios Hollywood, where you can view her mother and baby ultrasaur, parasaur, and T-Rex. She also worked for NASA and worked on the AX-5 spacesuit, the infrared airplane-mounted telescope called SOFIA, and an animal habitat that flew on the Space Shuttle. Her recent work has been in orthopaedic implant design and biomechanics, with projects including total hip replacement and measurement of spinal fusion with implanted sensors.
 
UC Connect public lecture: Inspired by Nature: Engineering as an Art Form by Dr Deborah Munro, Senior Lecturer, Mechanical Engineering (Lead for Medical Engineering), UC Engineering.

Contact website: www.canterbury.ac.nz/public-lectures/ 

Early bird registration will commence four weeks out from lecture date and will be available until all places are full. A second allocation of tickets will be available 10 days prior to the lecture. If you do not manage to register, you are welcome to arrive on the day and wait for all available seats to be released five minutes prior to the lecture commencing.   The UC Connect public lecture series offers the community the opportunity to attend topical, interesting, educational lectures on a range of topics given by experts in their fields. To receive notifications on upcoming UC Connect speakers, join our mailing list.   All UC Connect lectures are recorded and uploaded to our YouTube channel here (approx. uploaded 1 -2 weeks post event).