Moss wins DURIP Award for bat fluttering flight control research

Professor Cynthia Moss (Psychology/ISR) has won a $200K Defense University Research Instrumentation Program (DURIP) award from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR). The DURIP award will be used to purchase a Vicon real-time optical tracking system and multichannel acquisition processor system (MAP) for Moss’s study of the role of bat wing hairs in fluttering flight control.

The MAP system will allow Moss and her research team to follow single neurons over time, before and after epilation of the wing membrane, and also to study somatosensory signaling. The Vicon system will help the Moss collect and analyze data 100x faster than the current video system in use. It will ensure that complete data sets from every trial are available for analysis and allow for more sophisticated kinematic analysis.

Moss’s DURIP award is one of 166 awards worth $38.7 million the Department of Defense has granted to academic institutions to support the purchase of research instrumentation in 2010. These awards are the result of a merit competition for DURIP funding conducted by AFOSR, theArmy Research Office, and the Office of Naval Research, and Air Force Office of Scientific Research. DURIP supports the purchase of state-of-the-art equipment that augments current university capabilities or develops new university capabilities to perform cutting-edge defense research.

Published March 29, 2010