Welcome to the Mayerl lab! 

We are interested in exploring how interactions between an organism's anatomy and physiology generate performance across ontogenetic and comparative perspectives. Our research integrates measures of physiology, physics, and engineering principles to provide mechanistic insight into sensorimotor integration across vertebrates. 

Lab news

2024 - 05 - We've had a lot of lab turnover lately! Congratulations Skyler Wallace and Alex-Ann Velasco for graduating, and welcome to  two new undergraduate students Holly Sabato and Harlow Smith, as well as two incoming graduate students, Dylan Anderson and Emily Volpe!

2024 - 04 - Ani Smith won student of the year award at NAU for her work in the lab!

2024 - 02 - The First Annual Biological Sciences Student Symposium is coming up! Students from all around the department will be presenting, including several students in the lab! 

2024 - 01 - The lab just presented their research at the annual Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting!

Recent publications

Evolution, diversification and function of the maternal–infant dyad in mammalian feeding

• Here we review the mother-infant dyad in mammals, and argue that we need to explore the infant side of this dyad in more detail in order to understand how nursing (and suckling) has evolved and diversified.

The function of the mammalian extrinsic tongue musculature in the transition from suckling to drinking

• This project, led by undergraduate student Kendall Steer, demonstrated that different parts of the tongue, change differently during sucking and drinking, and that this is reflected by variation in how the extrinsic tongue muscles function. 

Regional Variation in Contractile Patterns and Muscle Activity in Infant Pig Feeding​

• In this work we studied the importance of studying both when a muscle is active and how it is contracting when active in order to understand it's function.