Melina Hale
Melina Elisabeth Hale is an American neuroscientist and biomechanist. She studies zebrafish and other organisms to understand the role of mechanosensation in limb movement and how circuits in the brain and spinal cord control and coordinate movement more generally. Education and career. Hale received her B.S. in Zoology from Duke University in 1992 and her Ph.D. in Organismal Biology from the University of Chicago in 1998. She is a professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy and Neurobiology and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow (1998-2001) at SUNY Stony Brook in the  Department of Neurobiology and a Grass Fellow (2000) at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA. Hale has been a faculty member at the University of Chicago since 2002 and is currently the William Rainey Harper Professor in the Department of Organismal Biology and Anatomy. She has served in various administrative roles including as Dean for Faculty Affairs in the Biological Sciences Division (2013-2016) and Vice Provost (2016-). She also served as Co-Interim Director at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA from 2017-2018. She serves as President (2021-2023) for the Society for Integrative  and Comparative Biology (SICB) and has previously served as chair in the Division of Comparative Biomechanics and in other roles. She was the keynote speaker at the Southeast regional meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB). Research. Hale's research examines fundamental principles of sensorimotor integration and movement to better understand biological neuromechanical systems and to inform the design of underwater robotic devices. Her work has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U. S. Office of Naval Research. In 2015, her team demonstrated that fish use fins to sense their environment in order  to modulate swimming. Their work since has further refined understanding of mechanosensation in membranous fins, including 2020 published work report on encoding properties of skin mechanosensors. Awards. Hale has received the following awards: