Over the past 20 years, there has been a quiet growth in the number of researchers looking to biology for inspiration for developing computational and robotics systems.  This should not be surprising because throughout history many innovators have used ideas from nature in their designs.  As examples we have Leonardo da Vinci's (circa 1493) "helicopter" which is based on a sycamore seeds, and Gaudi's (circa 1910) Casa Mila was inspired by nautilus shells.  In a similar vein, in the late 1980s Carver Mead, who was one of the pioneers of integrated circuits, made the observation that electron transport in silicon field effect transistors was similar to the ion transport in nerve cells, and therefore suggested that integrated circuits may be used to design computers and sensors that operate like our brains, eyes and ears.  This approach seeded the development of the Neuromorphic Engineering field, and is now well established across the globe (see www.ine-web.org).  As the idea germinated, grew and spread, researchers started looking at the entire organism for inspiration, thereby migrating from Neuromorphic to Biomorphic Engineering.  Recently, the field has taken another lurch towards Biomorphic Cognition Engineering, in an effort to host perceptive and cognitive processes in engineered bodies such as computers and robots. Prof. Etienne-Cummings has been involved in Neurormorphic and Biomorphic Engineering from their inceptions, and he will describe the evolution of the field through his work.  He will start by motivating his work on visual information processing, modeling the biological retina and parts of the visual cortex, and then focus on this recent research on modeling the spinal cord locomotion networks in silicon.  Using these models, he will show that a "paralyzed" animal can be made to work again, implying that these systems may be useful in helping individuals with spinal cord injuries.  Finally, he will speculate about what the future holds for this research, particularly in the area of fully neurally integrated prosthetic limbs and biomorphic robots.