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Kari Taylor-Burt, PhD, started at the Mount in 2021. She earned a BA in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology from Franklin & Marshall College. Her MS in Biology came from Northern Arizona University where she studied shivering in mice with a mutation in titin, a giant elastic muscle protein, that resulted in a form of muscular dystrophy in these mice. She earned her PhD from Harvard University in Organismic & Evolutionary Biology. There she focused on how duck legs (and the muscles that drive them) can be used across different behaviors and how leg anatomy changes with the degree of swimming specialization across duck species. Before coming to the Mount, Taylor-Burt returned to Franklin & Marshall College as a postdoctoral researcher, where she began an ongoing collaboration exploring obliquely striated muscle in soft-bodied invertebrates.
Taylor-Burt, KR, Konow, N, Biewener, AA. (2020). Post-activation muscle potentiation and its relevance to cyclical behaviors. Biology Letters. 16: 20200255.
Taylor-Burt, KR, Biewener, AA. (2020). Aquatic and terrestrial takeoffs require different hindlimb kinematics and muscle function in mallard ducks. Journal of Experimental Biology. 223: jeb223743. doi:10.1242/jeb.223743
Taylor-Burt, KR, Kier, WM, Olszewski-Jubelirer, J, Thompson, JT. (2018). Shape, size, and structure affect obliquely striated muscle function in squid. Integrative & Comparative Biology. 58: 261-275.
Taylor-Burt, KR, Monroy, J, Pace, C., Lindstedt, S, Nishikawa, KC. (2015). Shiver Me Titin: Differences in tremor frequency during shivering in mdm mice, elucidating titin’s role in shivering thermogenesis. Journal of Experimental Biology. 218: 694-702.
Thompson, JT, Taylor, KR, Gentile, C. (2010). Gradients of strain and strain rate in the hollow muscular organs of soft-bodied animals. Biology Letters. 6: 482-485.
Muscle contraction drives movement in animals across a broad range of behaviors and environments and in animals with diverse body shapes. My lab group integrates muscle structure, tissue-level properties, and animal behavior to gain a broad understanding of how muscle function affects the whole organism. We use a comparative approach, taking advantage of the natural diversity of muscle structure and animal behavior to probe form-function relationships. Current projects include:
Our integrative and comparative approaches allow us to ask questions about the evolutionary history of muscle and helps us understand how muscle functions during natural behaviors.