Professor Fritz Vollrath
I am an evolutionary biologist with a rather long history of studying the behaviour, ecology, life history and evolution of spiders, webs and silks. Other biological nano-scale materials have more recently attracted my interest, as have the rapidly growing fields of biomimetics, bionics, soft robotics, and indeed the generic idea of copying concepts from Nature.
In addition, I am deeply fascinated by elephants and their complex (certainly relative to spiders) decision making. As a longterm trustee of Save the Elephants, a UK charity with a research base in Kenya, I have had ample opportunity to study the ecology and behaviour, and increasingly also physiology and genetics, of the magnificent African elephant in its natural habitat.
After an internship with Niko Tinbergen at Oxford I returned to Germany to study Zoology, Limnology, Palaeontology and Physics at Göttingen and Freiburg with an MSc on Pigeon Navigation at Konrad Lorenz's Max Planck Institute in Seewiesen followed by a PhD on Web Spiders at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
I returned to Oxford on a Royal Society Post-Doc to explore with Richard Dawkins the spider's web as an Extended Phenotype. After this I moved (but keeping my spider labs in Oxford) to Basel on a junior Professorship and then to Aarhus as Regius professor all along doing fieldwork in Australia, Papua New Guinea and Kenya. The Kenyan link lead to the elephant research on the Smitsonian/Princeton Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia at first based on applying our spider web-building movement analyses to elephant movements.
Something I continued when I returned to Oxford to focus my research on silk as a key bio-polymer. This work led to a number of Spin-out companies in the fields of tech and medtec.
2021 Wall J, Wittemyer G, Klinkenberg B, LeMay V, Blake S , Strindberg S, Michelle Henley M , Fritz Vollrath F, Maisels F , Ferwerda J , Douglas-Hamilton I - Current Biololgy doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.03.042.
2020 Vollrath, F. and Krink, T. - Spider webs inspiring soft robotics. Journal of the Royal Society Interface e20200569
2018 Vollrath, F., Mi, R. & Shah, D.U. - Ivory as an Important Model Bio-composite Curator: The Museum Journal 61 (1): 95-110
2016 Vollrath, F. - The complexity of silk under the spotlight of synthetic biology Biochemical Society Transactions, 44 (4): 1151-1157
2016 Elettro, H., Neukirch, S., Vollrath F. & Antkowiak, A. - In-drop capillary spooling of spider capture thread inspires hybrid fibers with mixed solid–liquid mechanical properties. PNAS, 113 (22): 6143-47
2014 Vollrath, F., Hawkins, N., Porter, D., Holland, C. & Boulet-Audet, M. - Differential Scanning Fluorimetry provides high throughput data on silk protein transitions. Nature Scientific Reports, 4: 5625. access
2013 Vollrath, F. & Edmonds, D. - Consequences of Electrical Conductivity in an Orb Spider’s Capture Web. Naturwissenschaften, 100 (12): 1163-1169
for a good overview see
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XIeVwI8AAAAJ&hl=en
Professor Fritz Vollrath
I am an evolutionary biologist with a rather long history of studying the behaviour, ecology, life history and evolution of spiders, webs and silks. Other biological nano-scale materials have more recently attracted my interest, as have the rapidly growing fields of biomimetics, bionics, soft robotics, and indeed the generic idea of copying concepts from Nature.
In addition, I am deeply fascinated by elephants and their complex (certainly relative to spiders) decision making. As a longterm trustee of Save the Elephants, a UK charity with a research base in Kenya, I have had ample opportunity to study the ecology and behaviour, and increasingly also physiology and genetics, of the magnificent African elephant in its natural habitat.
After an internship with Niko Tinbergen at Oxford I returned to Germany to study Zoology, Limnology, Palaeontology and Physics at Göttingen and Freiburg with an MSc on Pigeon Navigation at Konrad Lorenz's Max Planck Institute in Seewiesen followed by a PhD on Web Spiders at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
I returned to Oxford on a Royal Society Post-Doc to explore with Richard Dawkins the spider's web as an Extended Phenotype. After this I moved (but keeping my spider labs in Oxford) to Basel on a junior Professorship and then to Aarhus as Regius professor all along doing fieldwork in Australia, Papua New Guinea and Kenya. The Kenyan link lead to the elephant research on the Smitsonian/Princeton Mpala Research Centre in Laikipia at first based on applying our spider web-building movement analyses to elephant movements.
Something I continued when I returned to Oxford to focus my research on silk as a key bio-polymer. This work led to a number of Spin-out companies in the fields of tech and medtec.
2021 Wall J, Wittemyer G, Klinkenberg B, LeMay V, Blake S , Strindberg S, Michelle Henley M , Fritz Vollrath F, Maisels F , Ferwerda J , Douglas-Hamilton I - Current Biololgy doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.03.042.
2020 Vollrath, F. and Krink, T. - Spider webs inspiring soft robotics. Journal of the Royal Society Interface e20200569
2018 Vollrath, F., Mi, R. & Shah, D.U. - Ivory as an Important Model Bio-composite Curator: The Museum Journal 61 (1): 95-110
2016 Vollrath, F. - The complexity of silk under the spotlight of synthetic biology Biochemical Society Transactions, 44 (4): 1151-1157
2016 Elettro, H., Neukirch, S., Vollrath F. & Antkowiak, A. - In-drop capillary spooling of spider capture thread inspires hybrid fibers with mixed solid–liquid mechanical properties. PNAS, 113 (22): 6143-47
2014 Vollrath, F., Hawkins, N., Porter, D., Holland, C. & Boulet-Audet, M. - Differential Scanning Fluorimetry provides high throughput data on silk protein transitions. Nature Scientific Reports, 4: 5625. access
2013 Vollrath, F. & Edmonds, D. - Consequences of Electrical Conductivity in an Orb Spider’s Capture Web. Naturwissenschaften, 100 (12): 1163-1169
for a good overview see
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XIeVwI8AAAAJ&hl=en