When

September 17, 2026    
7:15 pm - 9:30 pm

Where

Academy of Natural Sciences
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia

Event Type

The in-person portion of the meeting will be held at the Academy of Natural Sciences, BEES classroom (3rd floor).

Meeting agenda:
7:15 PM:  Zoom opens
7:30-8 PM: Club business
8 PM:  Presentation followed by questions (might start earlier if club business finishes earlier).

Please register for the meeting whether you will be attending in person or via Zoom. Then watch for the meeting link in your email. Disregard the meeting link if you will be attending in person.

Register here via Zoom

Fantastic Feathers: Form and Function

Speaker: Dr Lorna Gibson, MIT  (remote speaker)

 

 

“Have you ever wondered how birds work? Lorna Gibson’s new book, Birds Up Close: An Engineer Explores Their Hidden Wonders, draws on her experience as a professor of engineering at MIT and as a lifelong birder, to describe how birds work from an engineering perspective. Feathers, bones, bills, eggs, flight: all come in for scrutiny, sometimes at the microscopic scale, sometimes at a more macroscopic scale. Join Lorna as she shares highlights from the book on how the microscopic structure of feathers gives rise to their remarkable properties.

 

 

 

 

 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Lorna Gibson is the Matoula S Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow, MIT’s top award for undergraduate teaching. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. She has always loved nature and getting outside to walk, bicycle and bird.

 

(image credit: Isaac Cabrera –  electron microscope image of a feather barb.)

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