Torkel Weis-Fogh
Danish entomologist (1922–1975)
Torkel Weis-Fogh (25 March 1922 – 13 November 1975) was a Danish zoologist and Professor at the University of Cambridge and the University of Copenhagen. He is best known for his contributions to the understanding of insect flight, especially the clap and fling mechanism used by very small insects. James Lighthill named this "the Weis-Fogh mechanism of lift generation".
Education
Weis-Fogh was born in Aarhus and educated at University of Copenhagen.
Research and career
Weis-Fogh was research assistant to the Danish Nobel Prize–winning physiologist August Krogh, where he studied the flight mechanism of the desert locust.
He pioneered studies of insect flight with Krogh in a classic paper of 1951. He then spent a year at the Copenhagen Institute of Neurophysiology.
Weis-Fogh then went to the University of Cambridge in England for four years, where he discovered a rubbery protein, resilin, in insect cuticle. He continued working on insect flight.
He returned to Copenhagen as Professor of Zoophysiology, but went back to Cambridge in 1966 to become Professor of Zoology there, continuing to investigate mechanisms of cell motility and of flight.
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This entry incorporates text from “Torkel Weis-Fogh” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.