Graphics, images and figures — visual representations of scientific data and concepts — are critical components of science and en gineering research. They communicate in ways that words cannot. They can clarify or strengthen an argument and spur interest into the research process. Moreover, the process of making a visual representation requires you to clarify your own thinking and improve your ability to communicate with others. 

 

Unfortunately, little attention is paid to teaching this component in your education.  In this talk, I will show my own approach to creating depictions in science and engineering—the successes and failures. Included will be a discussion about how far can we go when “enhancing” science images. 

 

Working in collaboration with scientists and engineers, MIT research scientist and photographer Felice Frankel’s images and graphics have been published in journal articles, on their covers and in a number of books and magazines such as National Geographic, Nature, Science, Angewandte Chemie, Advanced Materials, Materials Today, PNAS, Newsweek, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, Popular Science and New Scientist, among others. 

 

She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and previously held the following positions:  Senior Research Fellow in Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Visiting Scholar at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Systems Biology, and the Chancellor’s Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Arts and Sciences at UC Irvine. She received the Distinguished Alumna Award at Brooklyn College, CUNY, the Lennart Nilsson Award for Scientific Photography, the Progress Award from the Photographic Society of America, and grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. In addition, for her previous work in photographing the built landscape, she was awarded a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.