Contact: Robbie Ward
Mississippi State University will be host Wednesday-Friday [Aug. 20-22] for the 2008 Bio-Inspired Design Conference.
The Hunter Henry Center event will showcase how materials and life science researchers work together to learn from patterns in nature to shape new technologies.
Giselle Thibaudeau said the conference brings together some 150 participants who have created partnerships among different disciplines through the use of bio-inspired concepts. A goal is to help forge new partnerships both on and off campus to discuss approaches inspired by nature and aimed at solving technological, design or research-based problems. (For more, visit www.bioinspired.msstate.edu.)
"The conference specifically focuses on how we look at biological designs and how they can be mimicked and/or adapted and applied to research problems or problems of daily life," added the director of MSU's Electron Microscope Center.
Keynote speakers include:
--Robert M. Nerem, 8:30 a.m., Wednesday. He directs the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience and the Georgia Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissues at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
--Christopher Contag, 1:30 p.m., Wednesday. He directs the Stanford Near-Infrared Optics and FEL Center at Stanford University School of Medicine.
--Arun Gokhale, 8:30 a.m., Thursday. He is a professor at the School of Materials Science and Engineering at Georgia Tech.
--Tim McGee, 1:30 p.m., Thursday. He is a biologist at the Design Table and a member of the Helena, Mont.-based Biomimicry Guild.
--Gregory R. Ziegler, 7:30 p.m., Thursday. He directs Pennsylvania State University's Center for Food Manufacturing.
In addition to Thibaudeau, other MSU conference organizers include Rand German of the Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems and Scott Willard, head of the biochemistry and molecular biology department and director of the Facility for Organismal and Cellular Imaging.
For more information, contact Thibaudeau at 662-325-3017 or Giselle@emcenter.msstate.edu.
For more information about Mississippi State University, see http://www.msstate.edu/.