Brian Taylor
Case Western Reserve University, OH·Engineering
Sea turtles, insects and many other animals travel across continents and oceans to specific destinations without a map. Many appear to do it partly by sensing Earth's magnetic field, an ability called magnetoreception.
- Fields
Engineering
Biology
Neuroscience
- Topics
magnetoreception
animal navigation
magnetic navigation
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2029
What they work on
- Use mathematical models and computer simulations to test how a navigation strategy that combines several magnetic field properties lets animals reach distant destinations without a pre-collected map.
- Model how a nervous system could encode magnetic field properties, linking magnetoreception at the neural level to long-distance navigation behavior.
- Test with simulations and robots whether and how a combined-magnetic-property navigation strategy keeps working as Earth's magnetic field changes over time and across generations.
More about the research
How animals detect this field, process it and use it to navigate, even as the field shifts over a lifetime and across generations, remains a long-standing mystery. The answer also matters for engineers. Satellite navigation such as GPS is costly to maintain, can be unreliable and does not work underwater.
Why it matters
Understanding how animals use the magnetic field could inspire navigation systems that rely less on satellites. Such systems could be cheaper, more secure and usable anywhere, including underwater, where GPS signals cannot reach. The noninvasive approach also helps explain migration in threatened or endangered species without disturbing them.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Yukitoshi Nishimura
Boston University, MA·Earth & Environmental Science
Determine how GPS position errors evolve during severe geomagnetic storms and how they relate to total electron content (TEC) structures in the ionosphere, using receiver data from the GAGE facility.
James Sherwood
University of Massachusetts-Lowell, MA·Engineering
Establish a tenure-track faculty line in Electrical and Computer Engineering focused on space weather, especially how disturbances in the ionosphere affect communication and navigation technologies.
Lina Ni
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, VA·Neuroscience
Identify the molecules that let newly discovered warm-activated neurons in the dorsal organ of fruit fly larvae detect warmth, testing a candidate new class of warm-sensing receptors with fly genetics.
The school
Case Western Reserve University: 34 labs on PI Pages, $643M a year on research, 213 research doctorates a year.
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