Jon Erickson

Associate Professor of Physics and Engineering, Washington and Lee University

Postdoc in Living State Physics, Vanderbilt University

PhD, Bioengineering, California Institute of Technology

BS in Physics, Harvey Mudd College

I love working on problems at the intersection of biology and engineering---I've been working in this field since 2002. It's such a rich interdisciplinary collaboration. I very much enjoy working with student groups on capstone design projects. This is my fifth year doing so, and their creativity and dedication to working on these projects never ceases to impress/amaze me. The first working prototype was really the brain-child of two of our consulting team members, Lincoln Neely and Jack Gaiennie, who just presented their design in Mar 2016 at the international SPIE conference on Bioinspired Design.

In terms of the stingray project, the ocean is a vast and largely unexplored space. It's not going to happen overnight, but perhaps a bioinspired stingray robot with high efficiency can monitor it, and other water ways, without disturbing the marine environemtn.

March 2016