Gordon Towne’s Undergrad Research Opportunity Project featured in BU Today
Inquiring Minds: Tracking Bats
Interdisciplinary research could help design unmanned military planes
Although he plants himself for hours in a computer lab, Gordon Towne is not your stereotypical geek. He’s a triathlete who also races with the BU cycling team. In other tests of endurance, he travels to far away places in record heat to study one of evolution’s outdoor marvels.
Towne (CAS’12, GRS’12) trekked to the Texas hill country west of Austin with Thomas Kunz, the College of Arts & Sciences biologist whose career studying bats earned him the nickname Bat Man. In an unusually blistering season even by Lone Star standards, they drove with other researchers to three bat caves and planted three cameras at strategic points near each entrance.