Fantastic Feathers: Form and Function by Lorna Gibson

Join us on Friday, August 22nd at 12pm for a talk about Bird Feathers with Lorna J Gibson, Matoula S Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, MIT.  This is a free lecture-style talk, to be held in the theater.

When we think of birds, we think of feathers. Feathers give birds their color, from the bright red of a male Cardinal to the iridescent reds and greens of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds. Feathers keep birds warm and dry: down provides excellent insulation against heat loss and water really does roll off a duck’s back. Feathers form the aerodynamic shape of the wing, enabling flight. A Barn Owl’s flight feathers suppress sound, allowing it to fly nearly silently, while its ruff feathers reflect and focus sound into its ears, enabling the owl to hunt in total darkness by sound alone. This talk describes how the microscopic structure of feathers gives rise to some of their remarkable properties

Lorna Gibson is the author of Birds Up Close: An Engineer Explores their Hidden Wonders, to be published in spring 2026 by MIT Press. She is the Matoula S Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, where she is also a MacVicar Fellow, MIT’s top award for undergraduate teaching. With MITx, MIT’s online education department, she made the video series, Built to Peck, on how woodpeckers avoid brain injury (available on YouTube). She has given talks on how birds work from an engineering perspective for the Massachusetts Audubon Society, National Audubon, the Nuttall Ornithological Club and the Arnold Arboretum, as well as for the engineering departments at MIT and Harvard University and the ecology and evolutionary biology departments at Brown University and Princeton University.