ECR Spotlight is a series of interviews with early-career authors from a selection of papers published in Journal of Experimental Biology and aims to promote not only the diversity of early-career researchers (ECRs) working in experimental biology during our centenary year, but also the huge variety of animals and physiological systems that are essential for the ‘comparative’ approach. Christina Harvey is an author on ‘ Lessons from natural flight for aviation: then, now and tomorrow’, published in JEB. Christina is Assistant Professor at University of California, Davis, USA, investigating how, when and why animals adjust their morphology in flight with the goal of inspiring highly maneuverable and adaptable uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) and advancing our understanding of biological flight.

Describe your scientific journey and your current research focus

My career began in undergrad in Mechanical Engineering with a focus on Aeronautical Engineering at McGill University. At the end of the degree, I hadn't quite found a ‘spark’, although I had heard about the idea of studying birds in a few classes and was intrigued. So, I stepped outside of my comfort zone and pursued an MSc in Zoology at the University of British Columbia under Professor Douglas Altshuler. There, I studied gull flight driven by the underlying desire to understand why their wings were curved along the span. Working with museum specimens, I found that gulls can adjust that curve by adjusting their elbow angle, which led me to quantify the aerodynamic implications of that motion. This allowed me to develop a background in wind tunnel experiments (using taxidermied wings!) thanks to a collaboration with Professor Philippe Lavoie at the University of Toronto. This study led to an interest in flight mechanics, control and stability. During my masters, I also got the opportunity to collaborate with Professor Daniel Inman and then did my PhD in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan under his supervision. There, I expanded on my previous work to use further wind tunnel experiments paired with numerical methods to quantify the flight stability and control associated with morphing the avian elbow and wrist joints. This led to my new faculty position at UC Davis, which both has a fantastic wind tunnel and is a world leader in veterinary studies, the perfect place to continue to blend biology and engineering. As I establish my lab (the Biologically Informed Research and Design or BIRD lab), I am broadening my focus to work towards developing holistic flight mechanics models of animal flight. These will provide novel insights into animal locomotion and begin to enhance flight maneuverability in aircraft.

How would you explain the main message of your Review to a member of the public?

This Review emphasizes the importance of developing a fundamental understanding of animal locomotion so that these insights can be effectively used to improve aircraft design. We collected examples of how insights from the biological realm were translated into engineered systems and also showed how aeronautical studies have expanded our understanding of animal flight.

Is there anything that you learned while writing this Review that surprised you?

I was excited to find out that the first use of the lift coefficient, in the form that we now know it, was in Otto Lillenthal's book ‘Bird flight as a basis for aviation’, which was published just after the Wright brother's first flight! Thanks to John Anderson's fantastic textbooks for pointing that out. This intimate tie between aerodynamics and biology at the beginning of aviation isn't necessarily surprising, but was exciting, nonetheless.

What was your approach in organising background material and shaping this Review?

As a group, we established some general goals and ideas for the Review. I then began by filtering my Zotero library by all the JEB papers that I've cited. In addition, I typed ‘flight’ into the JEB search and reviewed the abstracts of all the paper associated with flight. Collecting many of these papers helped us to identify general trends of how experimental biology has fed back into aeronautical related areas. Once these areas were firmly established, we then proceeded reviewing relevant papers in the areas. In collaboration with my co-authors, we then worked together to craft the paper pulling on all of our collective experiences. This paper was especially cool for me as all three of my co-authors are researchers that I have looked up to for a long time. I was honored to get to work with them and it was greatly beneficial to learn more about their perspectives on the field as we wrote this Review.

What do you see as the main value of Review-type articles?

For me, reviews are useful for multiple reasons. First, they serve as a guidepost for new researchers that are just beginning to explore the literature. But of equal importance, reviews are necessary to the field to be able to synthesize general trends and directions that have been made so that we can point towards clear openings or remaining gaps for future studies.

Are there any important historical papers from your field that have been published in JEB?

All of Ellington's and Pennycuick's papers remain a key starting point for many researchers in this field. It is hard to choose one in particular, but one paper that was influential for me was Pennycuick's 1970 paper (doi:10.1242/jeb.49.3.509) on gliding flight performance of a pigeon. He leveraged simple yet effective aeronautical tools to address unique questions estimating the drag and lift performance across speeds.

Are there any modern-day JEB papers that you think will be the classic papers of 2123?

The work led by the Royal Veterinary College using particle tracking velocimetry of gliding raptors has been and will continue to be especially impactful on the field (Usherwood et al., 2020; doi:10.1242/jeb.214809). It is one of the first ever measurements of downwash distribution on bird wings, which is a critical measurement for validating numerical approaches. The finding of birds using positive lift on their tails at low speeds is also useful insight for aircraft design. Not to mention, the technique used is both very visually appealing and scientifically impressive.

What do you think experimental biology will look like 50 years from now?

I expect that it will leverage experimental and numerical components in a heavily integrated fashion. We're already seeing this shift with the importance of motion capture feeding into computational fluid dynamics models. I've always believed in working towards a three-pronged approach that combines experimental, numerical, and analytical techniques. On top of this, machine learning algorithms will let us get closer to real-time analysis or investigation that further merges experimental and computational studies. I also expect that there will be less of a delineation between biology and engineering, as both fields benefit greatly by incorporating each other's findings and tools.

If you had unlimited funding, what question in your research field would you most like to address?

Can we feasibly build a plane that maneuvers like a bird? This requires our community to continue working towards answering questions from across a broad range of disciplines from zoology, to neuroscience, to material design, to flight dynamics.

Christina Harvey's contact details: Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA.

E-mail: harvey@ucdavis.edu