Professor Andrew Biewener in front of a fan, which will be part of the wind tunnel under construction at the Concord Field Station. Photo by Kris Snibbe.

"He trots fine and walks fine. One leg floats out a bit, but from an animal locomotion standpoint, he's fine," Biology Professor Andrew Biewener said with a slight smile. "That's one of the benefits of being a quadruped."

Biewener, an expert in animal locomotion and the new director of Harvard's Concord Field Station, wasn't talking about a test subject. He was talking about his pet golden retriever whose recent surgery had left him short some hip bone, but which otherwise hasn't hindered his ability to get around.

Biewener came to Harvard last year from the University of Chicago, where he was chair of the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy.

Over the years, Biewener has studied the locomotion of dogs, horses, wallabies, emus, capybaras, toads, goats, alligators, and agoutis. His latest studies involve birds in flight, which is why one of the world's largest wind tunnels for this kind of research is being constructed at the field station, above the now-empty silo of the Nike missile that used to be the property's main tenant.

Once the wind tunnel is complete, Biewener plans to release birds in the air stream and observe and videotape their movements from different angles for analysis. His current research is examining how muscle and skeleton design varies among different birds, as well as how the flight muscles of birds function differently from the leg muscles of animals that run on the ground.

One recent project looked at the mechanics of hopping in tammar wallabies, close relatives of kangaroos. Biewener found that a wallaby's leg tendons are so elastic that the animal expends very little extra effort to hop at faster speeds -- the elastic tendons do the work instead of the muscles. He also found that a mother wallaby has to expend very little extra energy to hop with the added weight of a baby wallaby, or joey, in her pouch.

The 60-acre field station, located in Bedford, looks fairly unassuming, though it is one of the world's premier facilities to conduct animal physiology research. It is undergoing a significant renovation, which Biewener hopes will be completed by the end of the year. On a recent tour of the field station, Biewener pointed out treadmills in the process of being reconnected and pressure plates that will soon be used to measure the forces exerted by running and hopping animals. He showed partly connected laboratory equipment and an ancient examining table that accommodates everything from ducks to antelopes.

In one of the station's three main buildings, Biewener shows a converted garage, whose huge doors, intended for vehicles, can be rolled up to create room for a large animal, such as a horse, to run over a series of force-sensitive platforms in the ground.

Though several faculty conduct experiments at the field station, Biewener is the only one who spends much of his time there. One of Biewener's goals is to have one or two other faculty members based there, which, with their research projects and graduate students, would create a hub of research activity, ranging from laboratory work to field behavior and ecology studies.

"You can house a whole range of animals with exercise space and have them available for study," Biewener said.

Alfred Crompton, Fisher Professor of Natural History and curator of mammalogy in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, described Biewener as low-key and said he has an extraordinary ability to get people to work together.

At the University of Chicago, where Biewener was chair of the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy, Biewener had the support of the senior faculty, the junior faculty, and the graduate students -- a rare achievement, Crompton said.

Crompton said Biewener fills a need in the department for a specialist in biomechanics.

"He's sort of low-key, but he really gets things done," Crompton said. "He's done some outstanding work about why animals are built the way they are."

Animals Around

Biewener has always had animals around. He grew up in New Jersey and Ohio in a household that included dogs, cats, and even a bird. Though he was always interested in animals, Biewener entered Duke University to study engineering, convinced by a high-school advanced placement course that he didn't like biology.

A biology course at Duke changed his mind and sparked an interest in biomechanics. He wound up majoring in zoology and graduated with thoughts of going to medical school.

"The question of how animals work has always been fascinating to me," Biewener said. "I've always been interested in sports and fascinated by the beauty of animals as they move."

Biewener first came to the Boston area after receiving his bachelor's degree in 1974. Interested in becoming a doctor, he worked at a research laboratory near Harvard Medical School for a couple of years before deciding to seek a master's degree in biology, which he got from Harvard in 1981. He went on to receive a doctorate degree in biology in 1982, also from Harvard.

After leaving Harvard, Biewener went to the University of Chicago, where he became an instructor in the Anatomy Department. He rose through the ranks until he was named full professor and chair of the university's Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy in 1995.

Biewener has won several awards and honors, including being named a Mellon Fellow at the University of Chicago in 1983 and a Graduate Training Fellow of the National Institutes of Health in 1977.

He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society of Biomechanics, the American Physiological Society, the International Congress of Vertebrate Morphology, the Orthopaedic Research Society, the Society for Comparative and Integrative Biology, and the Society for Experimental Biology.