Our lab investigates how animals interact with the physical world. We focus on specific physical variables that living systems must detect, respond to, and survive: mechanical forces, magnetic fields, gravity, and temperature. We ask how animals sense these parameters, how they generate and withstand forces, and what happens when these systems fail in disease.
Understanding these interactions requires developing new approaches to measure and manipulate them. Our lab builds behavioral assays, measurement systems, and molecular tools that enable quantitative analysis of organism-environment interactions. This approach bridges basic discovery with translational applications to neuromuscular disease and extreme environments.
These figures are read live from the roster that drives the lab website, so this page and that one cannot disagree. No national benchmark exists for trainees mentored at any institutional tier, so no comparison is offered here.
View alumni and outcomes on the lab websitePublication position. 16 journal articles 2015 to 2026 in life science fields carrying an Illinois State affiliation. Among the 98 Illinois State authors with five or more such articles, the median is 7 and the 90th percentile is 16. Pooled across nine Midwest public doctoral comprehensives, 507 authors, the figure sits at the 92.7th percentile.
Against research intensive universities. An h-index of 12 is reached by 7.0 percent of life science authors at Illinois State and by 11.6 to 14.0 percent at six large research universities, so the same record would sit near the 88th percentile there. Output per senior investigator is 7.1 articles here against 5.3 to 9.6 across those six. The difference in total output between institution types is mostly a difference in how many laboratories there are.
Output per dollar. NIGMS reports that the median investigator holding an R01 or P01 runs $220,000 in annual direct costs and publishes 1.71 papers a year. This laboratory runs $145,117 a year and publishes 2.09, which is at least 1.85 times the publications per funded dollar. At least, because the NIGMS figure is direct costs and this one is total award dollars.
Authorship. 71 percent of papers in the window are first or last authored, against a median of 50 percent among the 63 senior life science authors at this institution.
Every figure above is reproducible from the queries recorded in VGL_BENCHMARKING_REFERENCE. Sources: OpenAlex, NIH RePORTER, NIGMS Feedback Loop. Student mentoring has no national benchmark and is reported in absolute terms only.