The Magic of Bird Flight with David Lentink

There’s so little we understand about how birds fly. Through incredible photography and observations in his lab’s wind tunnel, engineering professor David Lentink highlights rarely detected bird behavior. By studying nature, his lab seeks to build better drones.

David Lentink is an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and member of Bio-X, an interdisciplinary biosciences institute at Stanford. Professor Lentink’s multidisciplinary lab studies biological flight—bird flight in particular—as an inspiration for engineering design. He serves as a member of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the Dutch Academic Year Prize for the Flight Artists, in which Professor Lentink crowdsourced high-speed camera footage to capture flight movements. In 2013, the World Economic Forum named him one of 40 scientists under 40. His publications range from technical journals to cover publications in Nature and Science.


This Stanford+Connects micro lecture was filmed on location in Washington, DC. Stanford+Connects is a program of the Stanford Alumni Association.
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