William A. Woods Jr.

Research Assistant Professor

Ofc: 617-627-4036
Lab: 617-627-5347
Fax: 617-627-3805
Email: william.woods@tufts.edu

Current Research

My principal current interest is the dynamic properties and functional characteristics of caterpillar muscle. Caterpillars have only a comparatively simple central nervous system to control hundreds of small muscles, and lack a skeleton to limit and guide muscle-driven motion. Yet, caterpillars are capable of an impressive range of activities, including climbing on irregular surfaces at any angle, burrowing, turning around in confined spaces, striking at attackers, and even shaping themselves into a loop and rolling downhill. Caterpillar muscles turn out to have consistent elastomeric properties of the kind associated with maintaining stability over uneven terrain or during perturbation (think of the springs and shock absorbers in your car). It is an open question the extent to which these properties can actually serve as a kind of automated control, or embedded computation—responding to changing terrain or perturbations without input from the central nervous system. My work is a part of the efforts of the Trimmer lab and collaborators at the Neuromechanics and Biomimetic Devices Laboratory to understand soft-bodied locomotion and to use this knowledge to build robotic platforms that can not only have commercial applications but can also in turn inform the biological research.

Overall Research

I worked on cars long before working on animals, and it would be fair to say I have stayed with an automotive mechanics approach to how animals do what they do.

Animals have engines, transmissions, springs, shock absorbers, brakes and radiators, and are concerned with issues like gas mileage, load capacity and weather. Questions like how a honeybee starts its flight engine on a cold morning, or keeps it from overheating on a hot afternoon, or how butterflies idle their engine economically at very long stoplights (months!), or what it costs a firefly to flash, or what a single caterpillar muscle does when its owner is out for a crawl, have been questions I have worked with during Ph.D. thesis years and since. If there is a take-home lesson, it is that it is amazing what hasn’t been done.

I grew up within cycling distance of Tufts, in Belmont, and apart from living in Costa Rica and on Cape Cod for a time, can’t seem to get far away for long. I used to build wooden boats, spent some years in business, and am a certified Mercury Outboard Mechanic, in case that’s useful. In leisure moments I enjoy using a French horn or trumpet to clear out large rooms.

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