Professor Elizabeth Brainerd
Elizabeth L. Brainerd is the Robert P. Brown Professor of Biology at Brown University. She received her doctorate from Harvard University in 1991 studying the functional morphology of fishes with Prof. Karel Liem, and then was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows for postdoctoral work in biomechanics with Prof. Tom McMahon. She was Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1994 to 2005 and then Full Professor at Brown University. She has broad research interests in the biomechanics and evolution of movement in vertebrate animals, including work on all major groups of extant vertebrates and feeding, breathing, and locomotor behaviors. At Brown she has worked with Prof. Stephen Gatesy and other colleagues and students to develop X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology (XROMM), which is a set of methods for visualizing and quantifying the movements of 3D bones in 3D space. XROMM has been adopted by many research groups around the world and is yielding new insights into musculoskeletal structure, function, and evolution.