We are a cross-disciplinary research group striving to understand the mechanisms underlying the control of natural movement and action sequences.
To this end, we study the adaptive locomotion abilities of insects with a research focus on the function of active tactile sensing (touch) and distributed proprioception (the sense of posture). Methodologically, we combine approaches from behavioural physiology (e.g., motion capture), electrophysiology (e.g., intracellular recordings) and biomimetic modeling in software and hardware.
The Department of Biological Cybernetics was founded by Holk Cruse in 1981. In 2009, it was fundamentally restructured. It is now headed by Volker Dürr.
09/2018: Congratulations to Luca Hermes for the "Best Poster Award" of the Neurobiology section at this year's Annual meeting of the German Zoological Society.
06/2018: The Department welcomes the new lab members Anke Fleischer and Dr. Volker Berendes
04/2018: The Department welcomes Dr. Dai Owaki from Tohoku University (Sendai, Japan) for a 5 month research visit.
09/2016: Congratulations to Chris J. Dallmann and Gaetan Lepreux for winning best talk and best poster awards at the annual DZG meeting in Kiel.
08/2016: Congratulations to Dr. Nalin Harischandra on his senior lecturer position at the University of Peradeniya, Sri Lanka.
02/2016: The New York Times featured our recent publication on stick insect walking in ScienceTake!