Topic: Experimental methods

Nedah Nemati examines how neuroscience defines behavior and why freely moving animals and naturalistic experiments matter. She discusses how tools, historical assumptions and researchers' own experience influence scientific questions, including what studies of sleep reveal about the relationship between observation and explanation.

It is often assumed that biological swimmers conform faithfully to certain stereotypes assigned to them by physicists and mathematicians, when the reality is in fact much more complicated. In this talk we will use a combination of theory, experiments, and robotics, to understand the physical and evolutionary basis of motility control in a number of distinguished organisms. These organisms differ markedly in terms of their size, shape, and arrangement of locomotor appendages, but are united in their use of cilia - the ultimate shape-shifting organelle - to achieve self-propulsion and navigation