Short Bio (Biology slant) (<100 words)
Talia Y. Moore is an Assistant Professor of Robotics and of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and the Museum of Zoology. She aims to symbiotically bridge robotics and biology, so that her work in each discipline informs and advances the other. She examines the biomechanics, evolution, and ecology of unpredictable motion in terrestrial animals, designs both rigid and soft bio-inspired robotic systems, and uses animal-robot interaction to test biological hypotheses.
Short Bio (Engineering Slant) (<100 words)
Talia Y. Moore is an assistant professor in Robotics and in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Michigan. She received a BS in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley and a PhD in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University. She is a recipient of the Gans award for distinguished contributions to the field of comparative biomechanics . Her work involves mechanical design, bio-inspired robotics, musculoskeletal modeling, materials testing, dynamics, and information theory to examine arrhythmic biological motion in both laboratory and field-based settings.
Biology-related Information
She received her PhD in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University in 2016 and her BA in Integrative Biology from UC Berkeley in 2008. She has participated in field expeditions in Malaysia, China, Australia, California, the Bahamas, and Peru.
Significant Accomplishments and Honors
At Harvard, she established quantitative methods for characterizing non-steady-state locomotion in jerboas, bipedal hopping desert rodents. Prior to her graduate studies, she worked at UC Berkeley in the PolyPEDAL lab, where she discovered tail-assisted pitch control in a terrestrial lizard. Among her designs are a safely huntable snake-mimicking soft robot, a 3D printed quasi-direct drive actuator, a modular quadrupedal robot (TROT), and a radially symmetric tripedal rolling robot (OmniGlide). She has been published in journals such as Nature, Nature Communications, ICRA, IROS, Journal of Biomechanics, and Journal of the Royal Society: Open Science. She was awarded the Carl Gans Young Investigator Award by the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology for for distinguished contributions to the field of comparative biomechanics and the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty award from the Oak Ridge Associated Universities.