Thomas Libby and Nicole George tied for the best oral presentation award and Rita Mehta won the inaugural Carl Gans Award in Comparative Biomechanics at the National Meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology (http://www.sicb.org/). Thomas Libby was a co-winner for his talk on how Active Muscle Enhances Rapid Perturbation Recovery in an Insect Limb, research conducted in Robert Full's PolyPEDAL Lab. http://polypedal.berkeley.edu/
Tom is a Masters Student advised by Professor Oliver O'Reilly from Mechanical Engineering and Robert Full from IB. Many of you know Tom as the Technical Director of CIBER, the Center for Interdisciplinary Bio-inspiration in Education and Research (http://ciber.berkeley.edu/) in 1099 VLSB.
Nicole George is an IB Alumna who conducted undergraduate research with Professor Mimi Koehl (http://ib.berkeley.edu/labs/koehl/index.html) and published a paper about her Berkeley research in one of the best comparative biomechanics journals (Journal of Experimental Biology). She is now a graduate student at the University of Washington.
Rita Mehta is another undergraduate IB Alumna, Class of 1999. Rita received the Carl Gans Award, initiated by IB's Professor Robert Dudley. It is an annual prize given to an outstanding young investigator for distinguished contributions to the field of comparative biomechanics and functional biology. Rita is currently a beginning Assistant Professor in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the Long Marine Lab, University of California, Santa Cruz.