About Me

I am in the final stages of a PhD entitled "C. elegans locomotion: an integrated approach", which is a highly cross-disciplinary project involving biology, mathematics, computer science and engineering. I am supervised by Dr. Netta Cohen and am part of the BioSystems research group in the School of Computing. I also have close ties with the Hope Laboratory in the Faculty of Biological Sciences.

I am currently looking for a postdoctoral position to begin around April 2010.

Research Interests

Generally speaking, I am interested in what can be learned from biological systems and how this can be applied to develop new technologies. In particular, the fields of bio-inspired robotics, neuromorphic systems and neural engineering are areas in which I would love to work and to which my diverse background would be most applicable.

Background

My education began with a BSc (Hons) in Electrical Engineering from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. My main interest at this time was robotics, and my final year project involved building and programming a simple robot based on Brooks' subsumption architecture. It was during this project that I became interested in bio-inspired technologies and neuro-computation. I went on to do a MSc in the same department, but on a topic closer to computational neuroscience. During this two year research project I explored the field of neural modelling, and wrote a thesis on synaptic plasticity in the Aplysia californica syphon withdrawal reflex.

Current Research

The Worm

Caenorhabditis elegans is a small nematode worm which happens to be an ideal model organism for both genetics and systems biology. In addition to the huge wealth of genetic information available about the worm, we even know the structure and connectivity of its small (302 neurons), invariant nervous system. Thus C. elegans offers the best possible opportunity to understand and model the inner workings of a complete organism at the single cell level.

Understanding Locomotion

The goal of our project is to apply an integrated approach to further our understanding of C. elegans locomotion. Our group combines biological experiments, computational data analysis, computer simulations and even robotics, with each of these disciplines feeding back and complementing the others. My main role in the group is as the modeller, although I have also developed several data analysis tools, contributed to the design of experiments and have been involved in an ongoing project with Kha Nguyen and Abbas Dehghani in mechanical engineering to develop a micro-scale wormbot using IPMC actuators. I have come to realise that an integrated modelling approach (incorporating neurons, muscles, body and environment) is required to truly understand this apparently simple but surprisingly rich system. It is also essential to stay grounded in the biological reality, so my project involves extensive collaboration with experimentalists in our group, particularly Stefano Berri.

Recently we have developed a new experimental approach, and used it to show that the worm's ``swimming'' and ``crawling'' are actually just snapshots from a single behaviour that is modulated by the worm's environment. In light of this finding I have developed an integrated neuro-mechanical model of the worm that reproduces this transition. To demonstrate the robustness of the worm's locomotion mechanism, I undertook a project with Jon Tapson (who was my MSc supervisor) at the recent Telluride Neuromorphic Workshop in which we developed a robot with the body of a lamprey and the brain of a worm. More specifically, it has a rigid, articulated body much like previous lamprey robots, but is controlled by an on board electronic implementation of my C. elegans neural model.

Publications

Bao Kha Nguyen, Jordan H. Boyle, Abbas A. Dehghani and Netta Cohen A C. elegans-Inspired Micro-Wormbot with Polymeric Actuators ROBIO 2010 accepted

Netta Cohen and Jordan H. Boyle Undulatory Locomotion Contemp. Phys. in press 2009 (PDF)

Stefano Berri, Jordan H. Boyle, Manlio Tassieri, Ian A. Hope and Netta Cohen Forward locomotion of the nematode C. elegans is achieved through modulation of a single gait HFSP J. Vol. 3 pp. 186-193 2009 (PDF)

Jordan H. Boyle and Netta Cohen Caenorhabditis elegans body wall muscles are simple actuators Biosystems Vol. 94 pp. 170-181 2008 (PDF)

Jordan H. Boyle, John A. Bryden and Netta Cohen An integrated neuro-mechanical model of C. elegans forward locomotion LNCS Vol. 4984 pp. 37-47. Springer-Verlag Berlin 2008 (PDF)

Jordan H. Boyle and Netta Cohen The role of body wall muscles in C. elegans locomotion Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Information Processing in Cells and Tissues pp. 363-375 2007 (PDF)

Prizes and Awards

New Neuromorph of the Year: Telluride Neuromorphic Cognition Engineering Workshop (2009) Colorado, USA

Best Student Paper: 14th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (2007) Kitakyushu, Japan

Contact Details

email:       jboyle@comp.leeds.ac.uk
tel:            +44 113 343 4699
room:        7.27 E. C. Stoner Building
address:   School of Computing, The University of Leeds, Leeds, LS2 9JT, United Kingdom