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Mitra J. Hartmann
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering
Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering
Member, Northwestern University Institute for Neuroscience (NUIN)

Northwestern University
2145 Sheridan Road, D153
Evanston, IL 60208-3111, USA

TEL: 847-497-4633
FAX: 847-491-4928

m-hartmann@northwestern.edu

link to research site

BSci Applied Physics, Cornell University
PhD Integrative Neurobiology, California Institute of Technology

Research:  Neurobiology and biomechanics of active sensing behaviors

Dr. Hartmann·s research focuses on the neurobiology and biomechanics of active senasing behaviors, and on the development of bio-inspired computational models and hardware to test candidate neurobiological algorithms. Our lab is particularly interested in how sensory feedback is used in real time to guide motor activity, and how movement enables sensory acquisition and perception. The main scientific interests of the lab are:

* How animal biomechanics enables efficient movement and active sensing.

* How animals represent 3-dimensional spatial information using spatiotemporal variations in activity across 2-dimensional receptor sheets.

* How the construction of hardware and computer models of animal movement and sensing can provide insights into the underlying organization of the nervous system.

Current research in the laboratory concentrates specifically on the sensory modulation of behaviors involving rhythmic movement, because rhythmic movement, and perturbations to it, is relatively easy to observe, measure, and quantify. We work with two model systems that use sensory feedback to modulate fundamentally periodic activity: rat whisking behavior, and bipedal locomotion. By studying how sensory feedback affects periodic motion, we hope to gain insight into the continuous, recursive interplay between sensory and motor signals during active behaviors.  This figure below shows how a robotic whisker array gradually extracts the contours of an object, in this case, a small sculpted head.

Face Scan

Selected publications

Solomon JH and Hartmann MJ (2006) Sensing features with robotic whiskers. Nature 443:525.

Towal, RB and Hartmann MJ (2006) Right-left asymmetries in the whisking behavior of rats anticipate head movements, Journal of Neuroscience 26(34):8838–8846

Schultz AE, Solomon JH, Peshkin MA, and Hartmann MJ (2005) Multifunctional whisker arrays. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Barcelona, Spain.

Hartmann MJ, Johnson NJ, Towal RB, and Assad C (2003) Mechanical characteristics of rat vibrissae: Resonant frequencies and damping in isolated whiskers and in the awake behaving animal. Journal of Neuroscience, 23:6510-6519.

Lewis MA, Etienne-Cummings R, Hartmann MJ, Xu ZR, and Cohen AH (2003)An in silico central pattern generator: silicon oscillator, coupling, entrainment, and physical computation. Biological Cybernetics 88:137:151.

Hartmann MJ (2001) Active sensing capabilities of the rat whisker system. Autonomous Robots, 11:249-254.

Hartmann MJ and Bower JM (2001) Tactile responses in the granule cell layer of cerebellar folium crus IIa of freely-behaving rats. Journal of Neuroscience, 21: 3549-3563