Steven Vogel (April 7, 1940 – November 24, 2015) was an American biomechanics researcher, the
James B. Duke professor At Duke University, the title of James B. Duke Professor is given to a small number of the faculty with extraordinary records of achievement. At some universities, titles like "distinguished professor", "institute professor", or " regents professo ...
in the Department of Biology at
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...
.
Life
Vogel was born in
Beacon, New York
Beacon is a city located in Dutchess County, New York, United States. The 2020 census placed the city total population at 13,769. Beacon is part of the Poughkeepsie– Newburgh– Middletown, New York Metropolitan Statistical Area as we ...
, and educated there and in
Poughkeepsie. He graduated from
Tufts University
Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learning. ...
and was awarded his graduate degrees from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
. Vogel joined Duke University as an assistant professor in the Zoology department in 1966, and taught there for 40 years, eventually retiring as professor emeritus.
Over the course of his professional career, Vogel, along with Stephen Wainwright and R. McNeil Alexander, played a fundamental role in the establishment of the discipline of
biomechanics, and was a prolific author of popular works on the intersection of physics and biology. His research projects included studies of ventilation currents in prairie dog burrows, flight in tiny insects, leaf streamlining, air movement through feathery moth antennae, and the mechanics of jet propulsion in squid and scallops.
Vogel died of cancer in
Durham,
North Carolina
North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and So ...
on November 24, 2015.
Works
In English:
* ''Life in Moving Fluids: The Physical Biology of Flow.'' Princeton University Press (1981; 2nd ed. 1996).
* ''Life's Devices: The Physical World of Animals and Plants''. Princeton University Press (1988).
* ''Vital Circuits: On Pumps, Pipes, and the Workings of Circulatory Systems''. Oxford University Press (1993).
* ''Cats' Paws and Catapults: Mechanical Worlds of Nature and People''. W.W. Norton (1998).
* ''Prime Mover: a Natural History of Muscle''. W. W. Norton & Co. (2002).
* ''Comparative Biomechanics: Life's Physical World''. Princeton University Press (2003).
* ''Glimpses of Creatures in Their Mechanical Worlds''. Princeton University Press (2009).
* ''The Life of a Leaf''. University of Chicago Press, (2012).
* ''Why the Wheel Is Round: Muscles, Technology, and How We Make Things Move''. University of Chicago Press, (2016).
References
External links
*
Interviewon Age of Discovery podcast
American biologists
Duke University faculty
Harvard University alumni
1940 births
2015 deaths
Tufts University alumni
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