Stephen M. Deban

Research in my lab is driven by our desire to understand how animals move and how the physiological and biomechanical mechanisms that produce movement change through evolution. Our approach is grounded in the principle that biomechanics and physiology are overlapping and mutually enriching fields, and that in studies of musculoskeletal function, they are necessarily linked. To understand the function of a given system and to ultimately discover principles that unite such systems generally, we attempt to integrate these two perspectives. We also take an evolutionary perspective in our projects, in addition to our studies of proximal mechanisms, so that we can gain insight into how present form and function came to be. The ultimate goal is to formulate general principles about how complex systems evolve in the face of changing and conflicting functional demands, which is a key pursuit of evolutionary biology.