Travel: Slenderness in Motion: The Dynamics of Elongated Structures Across Life Forms

This award supports travel for a coordinated group of invited speakers and student trainees to participate in a symposium, “Slenderness in Motion: The Dynamics of Elongated Structures Across Life Forms,” at the 2027 Annual Meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB), to be held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, January 3–7, 2027. By bringing biologists together with engineers, physicists, and mathematicians, the symposium advances the national interest in two areas central to NSF’s mission: artificial intelligence and biotechnology/advanced manufacturing. In addition, the two Principal Investigators will lead a hands-on workshop on Cosserat-rod modeling of slender biological structures, open to meeting attendees. Slender, elongated, and flexible structures are among the most common forms in the living world. The bodies of snakes, prehensile tails of monkeys, arms of octopuses, climbing vines, penetrating roots, and parasitic worms are all variations on a single design theme: reducing a living system to a thin, compliant, rod-like shape. The repeated appearance of this form across unrelated branches of the tree of life suggests that slenderness confers broad and fundamental advantages, yet how organisms control and exploit the complex movements of these structures remains poorly understood. The biology of slender structures is a direct source of inspiration for soft robots and compliant manipulators used in advanced manufacturing, agricultural robotics, and minimally invasive medical devices, and the data-driven analysis of such high-dimensional moving systems is a frontier problem for AI in the physical sciences. The award also broadens participation by enabling graduate students and early-career researchers to attend the meeting, present their work, and build professional networks, and it strengthens national research capacity by training biologists in modern computational methods. The symposium examines slenderness as an integrative biological strategy, with emphasis on recent advances in experimental measurement, dynamic modeling, and data-driven analysis of elongated compliant structures across length and time scales. Confirmed invited speakers span organismal biology, engineering, physics, and applied mathematics, and range from postdoctoral researchers to senior faculty. They will deliver a coordinated session of invited talks that will address how organisms balance passive dynamics (elasticity, inertia, and drag) against active control (muscle activation and distributed actuation); what scaling laws govern stability, maneuverability, and energetic cost across sizes and media; and how lineages converge on or diverge in strategies for reach, exploration, and attachment. The symposium will explore how contemporary methods, including high-speed imaging, soft-body experimental techniques, dynamical-systems analysis, and machine-learning approaches to inferring governing dynamics, enable new insights into these phenomena. Individual papers based on the speakers’ presentations and a group-authored synthesis review articulating convergent design principles across taxa and positioning slender-structure biology as an input to AI and advanced manufacturing will be published in a special issue of the SICB journal, Integrative and Comparative Biology. Supported student trainees will attend the symposium and workshop, present in complementary sessions, and participate in networking activities with the invited speakers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.