Collaborators

ASL works with a range of people here at the University of Manchester including Jonathan Codd and Roland Ennos in the Faculty of Life Science; Phil Manning who is jointly at The Manchester Museum and the School of Earth, Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences; Paul Mummery and Steve Eichorn at the School of Materials; and Heny McGhie at The Manchester Museum.

The ASL works with a number of people at other institutions on a variety of projects. These are listed below:

The Primate Evolutionary Morphology Group (PREMOG) based at the University of Liverpool is run by Robin Crompton and has a long history of biomechanical analysis of humans and other primates. Projects we have worked in the past on include orang-utan climbing, hominoid walking and strepsirhine leaping. ASL is currently working with PREMOG to look at the energy costs of bipedal and quadrupedal gaits; field biomechanics using remote accelerometry; and early hominid footprints.

The Structure and Motion Lab is based at the Royal Veterinary College Field Station at South Mimms. It is a large research group run by Alan Wilson which is primarily interested in musculoskeletal function and gait in a wide variety of vertebrates, and especially the role of elastic elements. ASL, PREMOG and SML are currently trying to integrate their modelling and experimental expertise to quantify the value of these elastic elements in quadrpedal gaits (both symmetrical and asymmetrical).

Andrew Chamberlain, University of Sheffield works on early hominid ecology, Russell Hill, University of Durham works on baboon ecology, and Brian Logan, University of Nottingham works on Agent Based Modelling. Together with ASL we are building agent based models of primate behaviour and ecology including working on implementing a virtual world for testing theories of early hominid evolution: the Virtual Plio-Pleistocene Project (VPPP).

Michael Fagan, University of Hull works on Finite Element Analysis (FEA) of bone and Sarah Elton, Hull-York Medical School works on baboon palaeobiology and human ecology. Together with ASL and PREMOG we are working on integrating FEA and Multi-Body Dynamic Analysis (MBDA) to produce a biomechanical model of the human foot.

Greg Paul is a palaeontologist and renowned dinosaur expert. We have been working on a Tyrannosaurus rex simulation to calculate how fast they could run and to investigate the relationship between body size and locomotor performance among the tyrannosaurs.