Professor Lorna J. Gibson is the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. Her research interests focus on the mechanical behavior of materials with a cellular structure, such as engineering honeycombs and foams, tissue engineering scaffolds and natural materials such as wood, cork, trabecular bone and plant parenchyma.

Lorna has developed an MITx course entitled “Mechanical Behavior of Materials” that provides an introduction to the mechanical behavior of materials, from both the continuum and atomistic points of view. Lorna demonstrates her interest in the natural world in the course introduction which was partially filmed at the Arnold Arboretum [view at: https://www.edx.org/course/mitx/mitx-3-032x-mechanical-behavior-2591]. She filmed another segment in the Farlow Reading Room that features the Botany Libraries’ copies of Robert Hooke’s seminal work, Micrographia, or some physiological descriptions of minute bodies made by magnifying glasses (1665 & 1667) and compares his extraordinary illustrations of the surface of cork, a feather, a flea, and the eye of a fly with current SEM images at the same magnification.

Enjoy the results at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFfVtziLhg4