Then, in graduate school at the University of Washington, he discovered flies. His research for his dissertation was on fly development and neurobiology, but, he said, “I was almost instantly much more interested in the function of the whole fly than the more mechanistic but probably more well-posed problems of how the little axons grow to the brain.”

After one postdoctoral position that was a misfire, he began working with Karl Georg Götz at the University of Tübingen on insect flight. “We built this very, very simple model of a wing flapping back and forth in 200 liters of sugar water,” Dr. Dickinson said. What they found was that when the wings flap, “they generate this flow structure called a leading-edge vortex.”

By using slow movements of large wings in a viscous medium, they were able to mathematically analyze the fast movements of tiny wings in air. “The technique is called dynamic scaling,” Dr. Dickinson said, and it is often used in aeronautics.

At the time, the nature of insect flight was still quite a puzzle, the basis of the popular myth that engineers had proved that bumblebees could not fly. “We were able to measure the forces,” he said, and to “make simple calculations that, you know, actually insects can fly.”

He was hooked, not only on flies, but on the idea of bringing a variety of disciplines to bear on one complex behavior.

“Fly flight is just a great phenomenon to study,” he said. “It has everything — from the most sophisticated sensory biology; really, really interesting physics; really interesting muscle physiology; really interesting neural computations. Just the entire process that keeps a fly hovering in space or flying through the air — it links to ecology, it links to energetics.”

So when Dr. Dickinson left Tübingen to move to his first full-fledged faculty position, at the University of Chicago, he said, “I tried from that day on to set up a lab that worked in this very integrative way.”