NSF-BII: Integrative Movement Sciences Institute

Muscle is the active tissue that drives the remarkable agility of animals, enabling feats of speed, endurance, and maneuverability in challenging environments. Understanding how muscle controls movement is essential for animal performance and evolution, and for maintaining human health throughout life. However, muscle function during fast, unsteady motions in complex environments cannot be accurately predicted by current models.

Current understanding is limited by isolation among fields, resulting in knowledge gaps between “bottom-up” reductionist approaches that characterize molecules and tissues and “top down” organismal approaches that focus on animal behavior. The Integrative Movement Sciences Institute (IMSI) will bridge these gaps by connecting “bottom-up” and “top-down” approaches to integrate the contributions of mechanical, neural, and sensory systems to movement control.

An interdisciplinary team spanning 21 institutions across the country will lead scientific research and training to integrate investigations across structural levels and timescales from molecules to organisms and nanoseconds to generations. The IMSI collaborative network will train scientists in interdisciplinary teamwork, mathematical modeling, data analysis, and open data sharing.

IMSI activities will drive innovation in biophysics, physiology, biomechanics, neuroscience, and engineering. Understanding the muscular control of agile movement has wide-reaching applications in bio-technology and the bio-economy through design of movement therapies, rehabilitation programs and mobility assistance devices.

Dynamic muscle function forms a critical foundation for an integrative understanding of movement, yet it remains a fundamental challenge to predict muscle force output in fast and unsteady conditions. IMSI will integrate muscular control of movement across scales by critically examining assumptions of current approaches, developing new experiments and models to bridge “bottom-up” and “top-down” perspectives, and constructing a dynamic muscle movement paradigm to transform basic science, clinical and technical applications.

Cross-cutting themes include unsteady and perturbed movements, multiscale modeling, and unifying invertebrate, vertebrate, and human studies. Research Cores include: (1) intrinsic muscle dynamics with rheological and X-ray diffraction experiments at nanometer to organismal scales; (2) embedded neuromechanical control to investigate how intrinsic mechanics and sensorimotor networks shape unsteady movement; (3) resilience and versatility to determine how variation in musculoskeletal properties and capacity drive whole-body movement; (4) risk-reward and learning, to determine how experience leads to movement optimization when navigating environmental risks and rewards; and (5) diversity and convergence in motor systems to characterize evolution of dynamic muscle function.

IMSI faculty have expertise ranging from molecular biophysics of muscle proteins to animal ecology and human-machine interaction. The team-based science, near-peer mentorship and co-supervisory structure will foster community and provide trainees with a wide mentor network from a range of institutions from primarily undergraduate institutions to research intensive institutions, creating a training pipeline from undergraduates to faculty.

IMSI will transform movement sciences by building a new foundation for dynamic muscle function and neuromuscular control of movement that integrates across disciplines, organisms, and structural scales.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.