Profile

I live just outside of Oxford in a cosy cottage with my husband Blake, baby daughter Eleanor and two rabbits Peter and Archie. Lockdown days are spent playing with Eleanor, daily walk in the countryside, watching Blake plant more things in the garden, working on my laptop and baking cakes. Peter rabbit tries to escape daily to eat Blake’s plants. We are enjoying daily ‘quarantinis’ with our neighbours during lockdown (at a safe distance!)

We know that humans have five senses, but animals have so many more weird and wonderful senses. I’m interested in a kind of silent hearing – vibrations that animals feel through their bodies rather than hear with ears. You have this sense too – you can feel vibrations through your body on a train or bus and people who are deaf can even develop their vibration sense to feel vibrations through their hands and feet to help them make sense of the world around them.

Animals without a backbone, invertebrates, are especially good at making use of this sense, so I study how these animals use these silent vibrations. They use them to communicate with each other, find mates, food or their children, or even find out what the weather is like. In particular I study spiders that use vibrations that move through their web to help them catch food.

This research is interesting in itself in that it tell us more about how animals interact with each other and their environment. But I’m interested in learning from these animals to solve problems in engineering. Can we get inspiration from animals in how to make super sensitive, reliable and durable vibration sensors for human use? This is what I’m looking to do, aiming to make sensors that can be put into robots so they can sense silent vibrations just like animals do.

I teach animal biology to 18-21 year olds and I teach older students that are doing research projects – asking questions and gathering data by doing experiments.

We are most interested in how animals use their touch sense to feel vibrations – for example spiders feeling the vibrations within their web. We measure these small vibrations using a piece of equipment with a laser, which I’m using in the picture to the right below. We also use computers to make virtual models of webs, which we can compare to real webs.