Christina Harvey, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, uses a combination of wind tunnel studies and modeling of inertial forces to understand how birds ...

Assistant Professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering Christina Harvey (front row, right) and Professor Michelle Hawkins, director of the California Raptor Center at the UC Davis School of ...

Insight into bird flight sheds light on the animals’ evolution and provides design inspiration for engineering. Writing in Nature, Harvey et al. 1 report findings that deepen our understanding of some ...

While it had been assumed that unstable gliding was the key to agility in bird flight, a collaboration between aerospace engineers and biologists has revealed that stability plays a role. While it had ...

In a rectangular room draped in camouflage netting, four Harris’ hawks took turns flying back and forth between grass-covered perches while scientists recorded their every biomechanical flutter. The ...

A tiny, overlooked wrist bone called the pisiform may have played a pivotal role in bird flight and it turns out it evolved far earlier than scientists thought. Fossils from bird-like dinosaurs in ...