Indoor Program: The Strength of Bird Nests – Corey O’Hern, Ph. D.

Recently, in collaboration with Prof. Eric Brown from the Department of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science at Yale and Prof. Rick Prum from the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at Yale, Corey O’Hern has begun investigating the mechanical and structural properties of bird nests. This work was featured in Episode 1 (The Nest) of the PBS Nature documentary, “Animal Homes,” which aired on April 8, 2015. Tonight he’ll describe preliminary studies aimed at characterizing the structural and mechanical properties of several bird nests from the Yale Peabody Museum nest collection. These studies have intrinsic intellectual value as well as technological importance for the design of novel materials with large strength to weight ratios. To date, there have been few quantitative analyses of the physical or mechanical properties of bird nests. We will describe measurements of size, shape, and more for several nests by deconstructing the nests one component at a time and, for other nests, we will perform x-ray micro-computed tomography studies to understand the structure and strength. Who better to tell us what amazing creations those nests are than Dr. O’Hern, Associate Professor with Tenure in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Science at Yale University with secondary appointments in Applied Physics, Physics, and the Graduate Program in Computational Biology & Bioinformatics!