The annual IMSI Symposium brings together some of the brightest minds in the fields of movement sciences at the University of California, Irvine. Photo by Brian Olmo, IMSI Communications Fellow. 

Written by: Brian Olmo | IMSI Communications Fellow 2025

Why do animals hop? When you go rock climbing, why do you place your feet a certain way? How do we balance ourselves after we trip?

Don’t be fooled! While these questions seem simple to answer on the surface, they’re actually very complex.

Answering these fundamental questions holds the keys to understanding animal and human movement, and that’s what a special group of researchers set out to do every year.

The Integrative Movement Sciences Institute (IMSI) held its annual three-day symposium from Sep. 4 – 6 at the University of California, Irvine, allowing some of the nation’s top researchers in movement sciences to get together and share their findings. 

IMSI’s goal is to further our understanding of movement sciences. This means conducting research on topics like muscles and tendons, foot placement, balance, rehabilitation and proprioception, the body’s ability to sense position.

The institute is directed by Dr. Monica Daley, a Harvard alum and professor at UC Irvine’s Charle Dunlop School of Biological Sciences.

Daley first started IMSI back in 2020 through a design phase award, or a small grant, from the National Science Foundation. She was able to bring together faculty from around the country virtually during the COVID-19 lockdown to discuss some of the biggest questions in the field of movement sciences. 

IMSI is split up into five core research areas with two leads each: Intrinsic Muscle Dynamics, Embedded Neuromechanical Control, Resilience and Versatility, Risk-Reward and Learning and Diversity and Convergence in Motor Systems. 

In biology, there are different scales, or levels of size, that researchers study, ranging from the molecular level to entire ecosystems. We can observe a body with our naked eyes, but there’s more going on that we can’t see. 

The molecular scale looks at the building blocks of life: proteins, nucleic acids (DNA and RNA), lipids and carbohydrates. Zoom out far from there and you start looking at whole ecosystems, analyzing how living organisms interact with their environment and each other. 

Think of one of those Russian nesting dolls, with different dolls all stacked up on top of each other. Remove one and a smaller one is right underneath. We keep peeling back layers to get a more complete picture of the body. 

One of IMSI’s primary missions is to bring together all of these separate scales into a unified whole through a process called integration. 

Daley, who is also a core lead, says this division among the cores is based on areas of movement science that require more attention. 

“The cores are designed to really focus on what we think are some of the biggest challenges to integration across scales, and so they’re focused around specific research questions that we think are either underappreciated or understudied.”

This year’s IMSI Symposium featured all sorts of experiments, each aimed at learning more about movement. 

One experiment looked at the legs of the guinea fowl, a large, chicken-like bird, to measure the interactions between the muscles and the tendons. Another had human participants walk in a bionic foot on a treadmill and would induce a perturbation, or a disturbance in movement, to see how the body would adjust. 

The findings of these experiments give us insight into how and why our bodies move the way they do. Aside from expanding our body of knowledge, this research benefits rehabilitation techniques and the improvement of prosthetics. 

To this group of researchers, what’s equally as important as the experiments and results is their teamwork.

Collaboration is the name of the game for IMSI. According to many of its participants, the institute’s greatest strength is its ability to bring together researchers from all walks of life under a single roof. 

“When you want to transform a field and create new experiments and new principles, you need a big team of open-minded people who are working together to really think outside the box,” Dr. Kiisa Nishikawa, a Regents’ Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Northern Arizona University and IMSI co-director and core lead, said. 

“Having a really supportive group where we’re all learning together and not afraid to make mistakes. Thinking outside the box is absolutely critical to what we’re doing.”

Daley also agrees that collaboration is crucial to IMSI’s success, saying that it’s a well-welcomed departure from the norm in her field.

“[IMSI] is really different because I do think it challenges the way that historically my field has operated, where labs have really been in silos, and they have their thing, and that can create a sense that you’re in competition with other people in your field,” Daley said. 

“But I think in reality, we all benefit from being more collaborative as a community. All of our faculty are collaborating extensively with each other.” 

The institute doesn’t just benefit established professionals. It also gives student trainees the chance to work with experts in the field. For many of these aspiring movement scientists, it’s their first ever time conducting an experiment. 

“I think what’s really going to be special are the trainees,” Dr. Craig McGowan, an IMSI core lead, said. “The opportunities that these students have and where they’re going to go and how they’re going to shape the future is really where IMSI is going to make an impact.”

“The next generations of comparative biomechanists are coming out of here.”

Want to see more? Check out IMSI’s LinkedIn Page!

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