Steven Vogel
Steven Vogel (April 7, 1940 – November 24, 2015) was an American scientist who studied biomechanics, the way living things move and interact with forces. He was a professor of biology at Duke University.
Born in Beacon, New York, he grew up in the Poughkeepsie area and studied at Tufts University before earning his graduate degrees at Harvard.
Vogel joined Duke in 1966 as an assistant professor in Zoology and taught there for about 40 years, retiring as a professor emeritus. He, with colleagues Stephen Wainwright and Robert McNeill Alexander, helped establish biomechanics as a field and wrote many popular books about physics and biology.
His research included how air moves in prairie dog burrows, how tiny insects fly, why leaves are streamlined, how air moves through moth antennae, and how squid and scallops use jet propulsion. He died of cancer in Durham, North Carolina, in 2015 at age 75.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 11:02 (CET).