Rate My Professor Marianne Porter

Marianne E. Porter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences within Florida Atlantic University’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Science. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine in 2007. Porter serves as co-director of the Master’s in Marine Science and Oceanography program, which she helped launch in 2017, and is a founding member of the School of Environmental, Coastal, and Ocean Sustainability. She directs the Florida Atlantic Biomechanics Laboratory, where her team investigates the mechanics of animal movement, including biological materials, skeletal systems, and locomotion in marine animals such as sharks and rays. Her research specializes in comparative biomechanics and functional morphology, focusing on the mechanics of stiff biological materials like cartilaginous vertebral columns and their effects on swimming kinematics, physiology, behavior, ecology, and evolution. Specific interests include skeletal mechanics, swimming kinematics, bioinspired design, and biomaterials, with applications to developing bio-inspired materials, devices, and robots.

Porter has received the National Science Foundation Early Career (CAREER) award. Key publications include “Automatic control: the vertebral column of dogfish sharks behaves as a continuously variable transmission with smoothly shifting functions” (Journal of Experimental Biology, 2016), “A comparative study on the mechanical properties of shark skin” with Shelby B. Creager (Zoology, 2018), “Age and growth of elasmobranchs: do vertebral band pairs record age?” with Lisa Natanson and others (Marine and Freshwater Research, 2018), and “Hammerhead shark species modulate swimming amplitude or frequency depending on cephalofoil shape” with Sarah L. Hoffmann and Steven M. Warren (Journal of Experimental Biology, 2017). She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on comparative biomechanics and sharks and rays, integrating foundational biology with marine topics. Her research on thresher shark vertebral mineralization and blacktip shark skeletal nanostructures has advanced understanding of hunting behaviors and material properties, contributing to bioinspiration in robotics and materials science. Porter emphasizes environmental contexts in locomotion studies, such as coral reefs versus open ocean.