Abstract
Living systems have evolved elegant solutions for energy-autonomous, adaptive, and durable functional units encoded within intrinsic developmental programs. Understanding how biological systems generate function across scales holds significant potential for addressing current engineering challenges. However, biological function is difficult to study due to its high spatial and temporal dynamics, and because water, driver of most biological processes simultaneously complicates their analysis.
Research in plant functional morphology, biomechanics, and biomimetics has emphasized hierarchical structural analysis, while inferring function in a subsequent interpretive step. This approach limits a comprehensive understanding of function as a dynamic, water-driven process.
Advancing this field requires in vivo, cross-scale functional analyses with a focus on water. talk shows novel approaches to capture water-mediated dynamics as a central driver of plant function, enabling the analysis of highly dynamic processes in living material systems and informing the development of next-generation bio-inspired “blue” materials.
Biography
Linnea Hesse studied biology at the University of Mainz and TU Dresden, focusing on functional morphology and plant biomechanics. She completed her PhD in the group of Thomas Speck at the University of Freiburg, where she used the the dragon tree as inspiration for fiber-reinforced technical branching systems. She then worked as a postdoctoral researcher in Freiburg and received a five-year fellowship from the Margarete von Wrangell Habilitation Programme in 2020 to establish an independent junior research group. Her research focuses on plant function and methods to study dynamic processes. In 2023, she became Junior Professor at the University of Hamburg, founding her Biomimetics Group at the Institute of Wood Science, working on functional morphology, biomechanics, ecology, and bio-inspired blue materials.