Diane Kelly

Diane A. Kelly is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her research interests include the evolution of copulatory systems and sexual differentiation in the nervous system. She is best known for her original work on the anatomy and function of vertebrate penises, but has also written children’s books, created exhibits for science museums, helped exhume a mastodon, and designed and published a pair of quirky science card games. Kelly holds a Ph.D. in Zoology from Duke University and an A.B. in Biological Sciences from the University of Chicago. She blogs at Science Made Cool.

Talks
Science Kits

14:43

When is research an exercise in fertility?

Diane Kelly

2012

When is research an exercise in fertility? (Diane Kelly)

Science Kit for Diane Kelly

Whenever I give a talk, I know I’m going to get lots of questions. I hope my science kit will help answer some of yours.

During my talk on making research an “exercise in fertility,” I explained how studying skeletons early in my career eventually helped me make discoveries about reproductive anatomy and function. If you want to know more about the diversity of hydrostatic skeletal support, Bill Kier’s recent Journal of Experimental Biology paper is a good place to start: http://bit.ly/H9ha6s (requires subscription or academic library access). If you want a more specific overview of hydrostatic support in inflatable penises, try my review in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, which I’ve made available at: http://bit.ly/GX6yCZ.

For even more detail, you might enjoy the paper where I first described the axial orthogonal collagen fibers reinforcing the mammalian penis (http://bit.ly/GVWiAr) or the paper where I tested the behavior of the collagen array during erection (http://bit.ly/HaflkB).

If you have any other questions or comments, I’d love to hear from you!

Best wishes,

Diane Kelly

http://www.dianeakelly.com