About the Commons

This website gives you easy access to many of the resources that Dr. Brodland and his team developed over the 32 years that he was a professor at the University of Waterloo. They carried out fundamental research on the mechanics of biological cells, and their goal was to understand how and why cells move during embryogenesis and cancer metastasis. Here, you can read about some of their challenges and discoveries and find links to their scientific papers. One of their favorite discoveries is a new technique for figuring out the forces that cause cells to take specific shapes or to move in particular ways. This novel technique calculates these forces based solely on the shapes of the cells as seen in a suitable photograph. We made a short video to describe how it works, and we provide downloadable software. Brodland and his team also developed many resources for teaching engineering mechanics, such as animated videos that explain how beams work and physical models that explain how structures work. For many of these models, you can download drawings or 3D printing files so you can duplicate our models. You can also download classroom instructions and watch videos about the models.