Scott Hooper PhD

Scott Hooper is a Professor of Biology at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, the USA, and a long-term (15-year) Guest Professor at the University of Cologne in Cologne, Germany. When he entered MIT as an undergraduate in 1974, he thought he would be a physicist. When he found that Hamiltonian mechanics were beyond his abilities, he finished instead with degrees in Physics and Biology. In his Ph.D. program at Brandeis University, he had the wonderful good fortune to take a neurobiology course that was taught by Eve Marder, thus finding his Ph.D. mentor, a field combining physics and biology, and preparation (the crustacean stomatogastric neuromuscular system) small enough to be conceivably understood but complex enough that one could spend a lifetime attempting to do so. He learned more about how to be a good scientist during postdocs with Maurice Moulins at the University of Bordeaux (stomatogastric system) and Klaudiusz Weiss at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine (Aplysia feeding) and more recently in his collaboration with Ansgar Büschges at the University of Cologne (stick insect locomotion). Scott uses electrophysiology and computer simulation to study how neuromuscular systems create movement. He recently fulfilled a life goal by co-editing (with Ansgar) a book (Neurobiology of Motor Control) with a full-frontal naked man on the cover.

At Ohio University, his research lab studies how animals generate rhythmic motor patterns such as walking, swimming, and flying at all levels from individual neurons to neural networks to muscle response to movement.