profile picture

Henry Cerbone

Biology & Robotics Researcher

Education

DPhil in Biology

University of Oxford, St. John's College
2023 - Present

MSc in Computer Science

Harvard University
2022 - 2023

AB in Ontology of Autonomous Systems

Harvard University
2019 - 2023

Interests

About Me

Hello, my name is Henry Cerbone. I’m currently a PhD student at the University of Oxford. I work on visual and proto-visual guidance in the Oxford Flight Group advised by Graham Taylor, Chris Thorogood, and Maurice Fallon. My main study systems are hawks (Harris’s Hawks), plants (waterlilies), and other organisms that rely on light for decision making/movement (which is most of them). Broadly, I’m interested in quantifying embodiment in organisms.

I have continued interests in 3D reconstruction techniques as they apply to biodiversity monitoring and perception research. I am interested in building computer vision tools for biology research more generally, so reach out if you’re interested in working on something together!

I am a US Rhodes Scholar (West Virginia and St John’s 2023) and Varley-Gradwell Traveling Fellow in Entomology ‘24 - ‘25.

What I've done/What I'm up to

Below are some of my current projects many of which are components of my dissertation entitled, Finding the gap: growth and movement in organismal guidance.

Characterizing visual attenuation and response during collision-free flight.
- Exploring the behavioral and kinematic adaptations of Harris's Hawks to moving obstacles via indoor flight experiments.
Mutual-information trajectory tracking for natural perception studies.
- Introducing a novel, head-mounted camera system for high-frequency 3D animal tracking.
Gaze strategy and guidance models during natural flight in forests.
- Reconstructing visual streams and kinematic trajectories in natural cluttered environments to study Harris's Hawk pursuit through forests.
Spatial optimization and gap selection in the Amazonian waterlily.
- Analyzing leaf placement and area maximization through long-term timelapse studies in the Amazonian waterlily.
An environmentally situated state-space model of embodied cognition.
- Leveraging concepts from control theory, we propose a novel framework to bridge the gap between bio-inspired embodied cognition and traditional robotics.

Where I've been

DPhil Student

October 2023 - Present
Oxford Flight Group; Oxford Botanic Garden; Dynamic Robot Systems Group, University of Oxford
PI: Graham Taylor, Chris Thorogood, Maurice Fallon

Visiting Researcher

June 2023 - September 2023
Biodiversity & Biocomplexity Unit, Okiniwa Institute of Science and Technology
PI: Evan Economo

Visiting Field Researcher

August 2022 - September 2022
Southwestern Research Station, Stanford University
PI: Deborah Gordon

Visiting Researcher

May 2022 - August 2022
Reconfigurable Robotics Laboratory, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne
PI: Jamie Paik

Undergraduate Researcher

January 2020 - May 2023
Microrobotics Laboratory, Harvard University
PI: Robert Wood