Biomimicry Fellows are university professors, administrators, or PhD candidates who have completed at least one week-long Biomimicry & Design Workshop or Biologist at the Design Table Workshop with us. Fellows are active in our Biomimicry Educators' Network and are committed to bringing biomimicry education to their respective institutions.

If you would like to apply to become a Biomimicry Fellow, and fit the criteria above, download and complete the Biomimicry Fellows Program application (PDF 108kb).

Please return your completed application to Cindy Gilbert, Director of University Education, using one of the following methods:

1) Email a scanned copy to cindy[a]biomimicryinstitute.org,

2) Fax a copy to 406.721.1146, or

3) Mail a copy to Attn: Cindy Gilbert, c/o The Biomimicry Institute, P.O. Box 9216, Missoula, Montana, 59807, USA.

Fellow Biographies

Heidi Fischer - Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona
Heidi Fischer is program manager of InnovationSpace at Arizona State University. Supported by the College of Design, Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering and W.P. Carey School of Business, this transdisciplinary education and research lab teaches students how to develop products that create market value while serving real societal needs and minimizing impacts on the environment.

Fischer also is a writer whose work focuses on natural history and environmental issues. She is coauthor of Valley of Grass: Tallgrass Prairie and Parkland of the Red River Region, winner of the 1999 Minnesota Book Award for nature writing. With Minnesota ecologist Chel Anderson, Fischer has coauthored a second book, North Shore: An Ecology of Place, forthcoming from the University of Minnesota Press in 2010.

She currently is working on a new book that explores the ecology of grief. She makes her home at the foot of South Mountain in Phoenix, Arizona. Fischer shares her yard, and sometimes her house, with southern house spiders, scorpions, coyotes, cactus wrens and the occasional javelina.

Carl Hastrich - Ontario College of Art & Design, Toronto, Canada
Carl is an Industrial Designer who sees biomimicry as a stepping stone towards evolving the way we approach design and nurture sustainable, innovative thinking. His background involved working in the Toy Industry in home town Melbourne making a variety of products, from collectable figurines to yo-yos. Having been exposed to the unsustainable practices going on in Toy Design and the toxic manufacturing environments in China he was interested in looking for new avenues to address these issues. Carl now works with Janine Benyus and Dayna Baumeister with the Biomimicry Guild in Montana and teaches at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, Canada, exploring biomimicry and how it may evolve traditional design processes.

Bruce Hinds - Ontario College of Art & Design, Toronto, Canada
Bruce is an Assistant Professor of Design at OCAD where he teaches Design Process, Interaction Design, Design Drawing, Think Tank (co-chair) and Biomimetics (curriculum leader). As a licensed Architect, Bruce maintains an active practice addressing issues of sustainable community structures in the developing world. Current projects include working with a multidisciplinary team of physicians and specialists in the Kilimanjaro Region of Tanzania to construct a sustainable community for children affected and infected with HIV. Bruce is an active member of the Architectural Institute of British Columbia, The Ontario Association of Architects, The Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, Associate of the Architectural Institute of America, member of Architects for Humanity and the Toronto Society of Architects, and an associate of the Ontario College of Art. Bruce holds degrees in Psychology, Architecture and Painting.

Delfín Montañana - Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, Mexico
Delfín is a biologist with a degree from the Faculty of Science of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).  From mid-2005 to December 2008, he worked as an assistant for research and planning on six different projects related to human impact on natural entities, and developed at the Laboratory of Ecology at the Faculty of Science in the UNAM. In 2008, Delfín attended the Urban Arboriculture course hosted by the Mexican Association of Arboriculture and the Autonomous University of Chapingo and participated in the Institute's Biologist at the Design Table workshop held in Montana. Since January 2008, he has been collaborating with two architecture firms, Bunker Arquitectura and Taller 13 Arquitectos, where he develops vegetation diagnoses and evaluations; he is also involved in plant list design in urban and residential landscaping. During that time, he has also been a teaching assistant on two undergraduate courses at the Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA), Campus Santa Fe, in Mexico City.

In August 2006, jointly with B. A. Raúl de Villafranca, Delfín delivered the lecture The Principle of Biomimicry: Respect for the Wisdom of Natural Systems, in the Sustainable Design and Ecological Building course offered at UIA. Since then, he has been a member of the Biomimicry Mexico group housed on AskNature.org and has delivered many lectures and courses on biomimicry design methodology.

Adrian Smith - Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona
Adrian Smith is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in biology from Arizona State University (ASU) . He has a B.S. in biology from Florida State University. He researches the communication and behavior of ants and is generally interested in behavioral biology. Adrian is involved with InnovationSpace at ASU, which is a senior level interdisciplinary product design class utilizing biomimicry. He is also on the planning committee for a biomimicry symposium entitled Social Biomimicry: Insect Societies and Human Design to be held at ASU on February 18-20th, 2010.

Raúl de Villafranca - Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City, Mexico
Raúl  de Villafranca Andrade is a Mexican architect with a degree from Universidad Iberoamericana (UIA). Since 1980 he has worked for his own design and construction firm. He has been a professor at the UIA, Mexcio City campus, in the Architecture and Urbanism department since 1979. He works inside the environmental design cycle as a member of the pushing core team, introducing ecological matters into the curricula. He is also the coordinator of the diploma course on sustainable design and construction. Since 2006, he has been applying biomimicry in site analysis and thesis seminar courses in the architecture undergraduate program at UIA. He is certified by the National Charrette Institute as a facilitator and administrator, and he was a participant at the Urban Revision Charrette "Framework for a Sustainable City Block," hosted by the Rocky Mountain Institute and Re:vision. The past three summers he organized and backed a 9 day, Biomimicry and Design Workshop in Veracruz, Mexico, led by The Biomimicry Institute.