Bowden award for researcher’s bird standing studies
24 Jul 2025

Royal Veterinary College (RVC) PhD student Yuting Lin has been awarded the Ruth Bowden Award for her work on how birds use their muscles and nervous systems to stand up from sitting poses.
Her research at the RVC explores animal movement strategies under constraints, specifically how animals stand up from rest and how those rules alter according to size.
Combining experiments, computational modelling and comparative anatomy in birds, Lin’s research pinpointed biomechanical constraints involved in avian sit-to-stand transitions with potential applications such as large animal rehabilitation .
RVC professor of evolutionary biomechanics at the Royal Veterinary College John Hutchinson explained how the research was essential for understanding vertebrate evolution.
“Yuting has opened up a new research area that remarkably has been overlooked. Animals need to stand up, not just walk and run, and standing up involves some biomechanical challenges different from walking and running,” he said.
“Her studies of bipedal birds are revealing fundamental principles regarding how anatomy, body size and evolutionary history shape the ability to stand up from a sitting pose.”
Thanking colleagues and mentors for their support, Lin added that addressing a biomechanical paradox – that large birds were evolutionarily built for speed, yet in a constant battle with gravity just to stand – helped uncover the 'rules of life'.
These rules connect humans to birds, to dinosaurs and “perhaps even to the first vertebrates that ever stood on land,” she said.
Named after the distinguished human anatomist Ruth Bowden, the scholarship is awarded by the British Federation of Women Graduates to female doctoral students to support them in completing their theses.
Applications are reviewed by a judging panel based on academic excellence and the quality and significance of their research.
Lin joined the RVC in 2022 through the LIDo doctoral training programme. Trained as a veterinarian at Zhejiang University, she later studied population health sciences at the University of Cambridge before focusing on evolutionary biomechanics.