UC Berkeley expert on insect flight receives prestigious MacArthur 'gen...( electrical signals from them. T...)

"There is nobody in the world who has the range of expertise, from neurophysiological approaches through fluid mechanics, that Michael has," Lauder said.

Ron Fearing, professor of mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley, leads a team now building a micromechanical flying insect based on the principles that Dickinson has discovered.

"It is Michael's aerodynamic breakthrough that is going to make our micromechanical flying insect possible," he said.

Dickinson has a background in both neurology and zoology. He obtained his bachelor's degree in neural science from Brown University (1984) and his PhD in zoology from the University of Washington (1989). Following a series of postdoctoral appointments he joined the University of Chicago faculty in 1991, leaving for a tenured position at UC Berkeley in 1996. He became a full professor in 2000.

Born in Seaford, Del., he grew up in Baltimore and Philadelphia. Originally intending to pursue sculpture when he entered Brown University, he switched to neurobiology because of his fascination with the mechanisms that underlie animal behavior.

His honors include a graduate fellowship from the National Science Foundation (1985), the Larry Sandler Award from the Genetic Society of America (1990), a Packard Foundation Fellowship (1992), and the George Bartholomew Award for Physiology from the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology (1995).

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Contact: Robert Sanders
rls@pa.urel.berkeley.edu
510-643-6998
University of California - Berkeley
24-Oct-2001